


Blue Canary

by BeepGrandCherokeeper



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anal Fingering, Animal Death, Background Case, Developing Relationship, Falling In Love, First Time, Happy Ending, Ken Doll Android Anatomy | Androids Have No Genitalia (Detroit: Become Human), M/M, Minor Character Death, Pushing Daisies References, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Wire Play, not as bad as the tags make it sound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2019-10-17 07:01:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17555612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeepGrandCherokeeper/pseuds/BeepGrandCherokeeper
Summary: On Connor's very first test run as a negotiator, he discovers a unique ability no other android possesses: with one touch, Connor can raise the dead. His gift comes in handy when his reluctant partner, Lieutenant Hank Anderson, is found dead at a crime scene. Bringing him back has consequences - someone else has to die in his place, and for the rest of Hank's life, he and Connor can never touch again. All of these risks, and the risk of CyberLife discovering what Connor's done, don't matter. Connor wants Hank to live.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It is my privilege to present to you all my 2018 Big Bang fic! I am immensely grateful to the friends I've made in the last four months, to the community I have so much enjoyed, and the artists who so graciously dedicated their time to creating gorgeous pieces based on my work. A very special thank you also to the people who encouraged me through every step of this project, protected me from my own self-destructive tendencies, and went through it with a fine toothed comb teasing out all my mistakes and showing me how to make it better. This is, in a very real sense, for you.
> 
> Please check out links to the artists at the bottom of the page!

Connor knows the dwarf gourami is dead before he touches it.

As he exits the elevator, tucking his calibrations quarter back into a jean pocket, he runs a cursory scan of the penthouse’s foyer. Every detail visible to the naked eye, and some that aren’t, flood into his field of vision: the thin layer of freshwater puddled on the floor, tracks from heavy boots trailing through the water and into the rest of the apartment, a bullet wedged into the back wall of a large aquarium. Colorful fish flit back and forth in the foot’s worth of water that’s left, in evident agitation. And there on the floor, near a jagged piece of broken glass, is the lifeless little body. It’s easy enough to piece together what’s happened.

Shards crunch under his shoes as he approaches, half-listening to the sounds drifting out from further inside. A woman is struggling, shouting. Begging. He lets her fade to the back of his mind, auditory processors prepared to kick up again when they register certain keywords, and crouches down to examine the mess. The fish has asphyxiated, probably still flopping even as Detroit police and SWAT agents stormed the hallway in search of their target. Likely, he’s the first even to have seen it.

The colors of its scales stand out against the flat grey of the floor, blue and orange-red, even yellow at the tips of its whiskers. On his forehead, he knows his LED is a similar blue. Steady, stable. Cycling as he logs each piece of evidence he’s found with a pre-programmed efficacy. To that end, he saves each detail in its own specific file – glass, footprints, ballistic schematics quickly drafted up in his reconstruction routine, the dead fish – and makes note of them in his log.

His index finger brushes what approximates for a fish’s cheek, a bright blue flare to the side of one beady, black, unseeing eye. Then he curls the rest of his hand around it. There is no sensation. Based on what he knows about fish, he’d assume someone else might describe it as cold, or clammy, or wet, but he senses nothing but weight. This model is a prototype, after all, and this mission is clearly intended as nothing more than a test run. One of the technicians had explained as much before they sent him out. Perhaps physical touch, or a simulacrum of it, will come later if it’s deemed necessary.

Something passes between his fingers, a sudden charge like static electricity. It dissipates quickly as it comes and leaves him twitching. Frowning briefly, in a (successful) test of his emotional responses to external stimuli, he pulls up the diagnostic notes related to his hands. The surge registered as a spike of data, flowing outward, but other than that he is not malfunctioning. He closes the window, preparing to upload an error report to CyberLife–

And then he feels it again; not in his hand, but against it. A sudden seize, spasms, the strength of which nearly make him lose his grip.

The fish flaps desperately against him. It beats its tail against his thumb, the fragile dorsal fin fanning beneath his fingers. It is alive.

In one smooth, unhurried motion, Connor gets to his feet and drops it through a hole in the tank wall. Once it hits the water, it rights itself in a way that seems almost indignant and swims away, rejoining its tank mates as they spin in circles.

It had been dead. Connor knows that, very certainly, just as he knows the name of its species and that it is not dead anymore.

Wiping the water and residue from the fish’s body onto his pants, he decides to flag the moment as a potential point of reference for whoever would be sorting through his logs later. They will review the footage and come to their own conclusion. For now, much as it triggers his burgeoning detective’s curiosity, he has other matters of concern. The woman who’s been making a fuss is getting closer, arguing with her escort as they remove her from the scene, and an authoritative male voice issues indistinct commands from another room.

Sparing the dwarf gourami a last look, he skirts around the woman’s grasping hands as a SWAT agent physically bustles her into the elevator. She screams after him, crying for her daughter and demanding that they send in someone else, but Connor knows there is no one else. He was built for this purpose, to do a specific job and to do it well. No one has a better chance of success.

He never had plans to manipulate the bodies left behind in the deviant’s wake. Even without the trouble of leaving behind fingerprints, something he physically cannot do, moving bodies and examining specimens seems too much like basic policework. Too close to stepping on government funded toes for it to go unnoticed. After his… surprise with the fish, however, he decides to take extremely good care not to come within a six-inch radius of each dead person. It is possible it had been a fluke, or that the same trick won’t work twice. He’s not prepared to deal with the consequences if he is wrong.

The closest he comes is with a downed police officer outside on the balcony, a pool of blood slowly growing beneath him. As he speaks to the deviant, calmly pushing and prodding its emotional state to his best advantage, he pulls up the officer’s heartbeat and studies the severity of his wound. The idea of touching him while he is dying, perhaps at the exact moment of his death, is an unpleasant one. Still, pushed along by his objectives to reach the deviant and minimize casualties, he detours briefly to use his tie as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding. There is no spark when his hand touches the man’s arm. He will live, most likely, though he’s faint from blood loss and pain.

“All humans die,” the deviant says, pressing its gun into the little girl’s temple. “What does it matter if that one dies now?”

 _Do all fish die?_ Connor wants to ask, a strange impulse that junks itself as a glitch almost immediately. He edges closer, holding up his bloodied palms in faux surrender. “You aren’t really angry. This is just an error in your programming,” he says, never tearing his gaze away.

“You don’t know how I feel!”

Two bodies in the apartment, perforated by bullets. At least one officer who requires immediate medical attention. A single dead fish, alive again, swimming laps in a broken tank. The lie comes easily. “I know that it isn’t your fault.”

The deviant sags. Something gleams in its downturned eyes. “No. It’s not my fault.”

“Give me the gun, Daniel,” Connor says. He’s still moving, so close he can nearly touch them. The little girl strains toward him, scrabbling at the deviant’s grip with one hand and reaching with the other. Her fingers are stained fresh, bright blue. “I’ll explain everything to them. About the replacement model, and your owner. Just hand over the gun and let her go.”

Its hand shakes. The LED light on its forehead pulses an angry red, interspersed with brief flickers of yellow. Orange, Connor thinks, basic color theory, a slick body big as his hand striped with electric blue. Focus.

“And then they’ll let me go?””

“Yes.”

There is only a moment’s worth of a pause, the air thick between them, before the deviant takes its gun away from the girl’s forehead. She twists to get free, fists beating at its fingers. Her breath hitches between sobs.

It readjusts its hold on her, pinning one of her arms against her body with the crook of its elbow.

“You’re lying,” it says.

Then it takes a step back.

Connor lunges towards them, both hands clamping like vises around the girl’s outstretched, flailing hand. One of her bones cracks beneath the strength of his grip, and she screams, but he knows even before he uses his momentum to tug her past him that she will survive. As he plummets over the edge of the building, taking her place, he turns himself round in midair to stare up at the sky. He considers precisely where his strategy failed – too eager to placate the target, maybe – and decides to use the time remaining to deposit all the information he’s gathered directly into CyberLife’s databases.

Seventy floors are a long way down. He finishes the upload with seconds to spare.

 

* * *

 

 There are pieces missing, when he wakes again. Figuratively and literally. The seconds of visual memory between his decision to grab the little girl and the moment of impact are gone, as well as one of his arms and the plating over his stomach. A technician fiddles with the wiring there, wiping out ports and cleaning tubes with a shammy she leaves hanging out of her breast pocket. Connor feels none of it. Blinking, he watches her work for several minutes in silence.

“Mark II’s internal systems all seem to be functioning,” she says aloud. With a finger, she presses a small headset with a thin extending wire microphone deeper into her ear. “I can’t find anything out of the ordinary in any of its processors or physical components.” Her lower lip juts out as she stops to listen, one hand lingering inside Connor’s chassis. “Well, yeah, we’ve made a couple of improvements on the Mark I, but otherwise it’s the same. We couldn’t isolate what it was that caused it in the first place.”

“Have you accessed my previous model’s diagnostic reports?” Connor asks. “I was careful to take copious notes.”

The technician jumps back so quickly she dislodges a small series of wires, all connected to his arms. His empty shoulder socket’s ports open and close in a fruitless attempt to release the arm that isn’t there. Luckily, it’s sitting on a table nearby, safe from being dropped.

“Jesus!” she gasps, throwing a hand over her heart. “Holy shit, oh my god, you – what?” Giving Connor an uneasy look, she reaches back into his open stomach and reconnects each component. Then she takes a step back. She isn’t addressing him. “No, it’s fine, it just… came back online, I guess. Yeah, it’s awake. You didn’t hear that?”

Connor attempts to smile, drawing upon his social interface to smooth over any distress he might have caused. The program does not respond. Perhaps the technician has disabled his unnecessary behaviors. To achieve the same purpose, he says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

She furrows her brow. “It asked if we checked the logs, so I’m assuming the personality matrix and memory transferred fine. I was going to make sure of that before we flipped it on. Yeah. Yeah, okay, Richard, fine. Come check it out. I’ll be here.”

With that, she tugs the headset out of her ear and throws it onto the table next to Connor’s arm, making a sound indicating her disgust.

“God, he’s a dick,” she says. Connor isn’t expected to respond, so far as he can tell, so he doesn’t. As she mutters to herself, she takes up his arm and manipulates it back and forth. Once she’s tested it to her satisfaction, she begins the process of reattaching it to his body. “Not like I haven’t been working on this by myself for twelve hours, left with all the grunt work while he does who knows what…”

To keep her from startling again, Connor clears his throat. It’s a tinny sound, small and purely vocal with no muscle response to accompany it, but it catches the technician’s attention. One of her hands freezes on his shoulder, the other pressing the panel of his stomach back over his wiring.

“I appreciate your efforts in fixing me,” he says. “It’s unfortunate that my predecessor failed.”

She pops his arm into place. Once it’s hooked up to the rest of his pseudo-nervous system, synthetic skin covers the white plastic in slow-moving ripples.

“Yeah,” she sighs, patting his stomach. That begins to cover itself, as well. “You don’t know the half of it, buddy.”

By the time the man she’d called Richard arrives, several other official looking people trailing behind him, Connor has scanned everything in the room at least twice. There’s very little for him to discover, especially on repeat viewings, but as he can’t move his body there’s nothing else for him to do. The technician refuses to engage him in conversation for more than a few exchanges at a time, rubbing at her eyes and swearing under her breath. She stands at attention in Richard’s presence, hands clasped in front of her. The Thirium on her shammy has faded away.

“Is he operational, Gabby?” Richard asks. He pushes his glasses up his nose. “Fully operational?”

“Not quite,” the technician says. “Everything looked fine in the tests, but I thought it would be better to wait for you to–”

Before he lets her finish, Richard heads to a computer and starts typing. The keys clack. Apparently in response, Connor feels the parts of his programming that would not respond to his cues begin firing. Belatedly, he smiles.

“All right, Connor,” Richard says, without looking up. He types a few more phrases, and then the rigging keeping Connor in place begins to hiss. Slowly, it deposits him on the podium, his bare feet twitching against the cold metal – cold. He’s thought the word before he can register what it means, a physical sensation unlike any he’s had before. Surprised, he turns to look at Gabby. She shrugs.

They run through several experiments together, most of which Connor remembers from when his predecessor was activated. His fine motor skills are perfect, as well as his facial responses to different hypothetical stimuli. He can sit, walk, run, jump, and finally, after he’s taken a few laps around the room, Richard calls him back to stand where he started. Then the metal beneath his feet changes temperature.

“Feel free to get down when it becomes too hot,” Richard says, watching him over his glasses with an eager expression.

Connor does, several fractions of a degree before the heat becomes a danger to his system. The people Richard brought with him make sounds of appreciation, talking amongst themselves excitedly.

Then they bring in the mice.

One of the boxes moves slightly when another lab technician sets it down, the sound of squeaking coming from somewhere inside. Connor has no way of knowing what the sounds mean, whether the mice are happy or in distress. Gabby, who’s been covering up her yawns with decreasing success, watches the box with an expression of distaste. He can’t decipher that, either. The other box doesn’t move at all, or make any sound. Richard puts his hand over the top of it as he speaks, explaining to the observers what they’re going to do next.

“Connor,” he says, turning to face him, “I’d like you to put out your hands. You’re going to hold a mouse.”

Connor doesn’t ask why. None of this is about asking why. He cups his hands together and lifts them, waiting. Richard takes one of the mice out of the box that squeaks and brings it to him.

It’s warm, and grey with white specks. He moves his hands so that the mouse sits in one and the other hovers over its back, keeping it caged in carefully so it doesn’t jump. It seems entirely uninterested in him. It sniffs, almost constantly, but otherwise it’s content to be still and let him hold it. Connor glances up at Richard and raises an eyebrow. Chuckling, he takes the mouse away and puts it back in with the others, closing the lid.

“He was pretty gentle with it,” one of the people says. “Is that standard?”

“Better than the alternative.” Richard pulls a pair of latex gloves out of his pants pocket and snaps them on before he opens the second box. He takes something small into his grip, with much less delicacy than he had shown before, and opens his hands to show what it is he’s holding to the group. “Here we go,” he says to them. He seems nervous, or excited, heart pounding away in his chest. Connor can see the simulated x-ray, when he focuses. The closer he gets to Connor’s stage, the faster it goes.

“You’re experiencing distress,” Connor  says. “Do you need assistance?”

“Just put out your hands again. Keep them steady.”

He does, the same way he had before. There is a moment, a tense moment, where Richard takes several deep and uneven breaths. Then he drops a dead mouse into Connor’s upturned palms.

A static shock passes between his palm and the lifeless body – a current of electricity, a closed loop, shared between them multiple times in one short second. His fingers twitch uncontrollably, a brief spasm.

Then, he feels it move.

On some impulse, his hands fly apart, quick to be rid of what it is causing him… is he experiencing distress of his own? Unlikely. He has no emotions. In any case, he drops the mouse as soon as it begins to squirm. He tries to rectify his mistake immediately, but Richard is still close, and he manages to get his hands around it.

“Holy shit.” He says it in a low whisper, like it’s been punched out of him. The mouse protests loudly at its handling, or because it’s just as shocked as Richard seems to be. Adjusting his grip, he strokes the mouse with a thumb. It bites. Richard doesn’t notice. “Holy fucking shit, he did it.”

There’s an uproar in the room for several long minutes, while Connor stands still and watches them all exclaim and shout and debate what it is that’s happened. What this means. How many more experiments they’ll need to run, and if it works on small animals, will it work on anything – could he bring a dead person back? Does it matter if they’re freshly dead, or if they’ve been dead a long time? The mouse goes back in its box, separated from the others, but it isn’t forgotten. Several times, Richard opens the lid to check whether it’s still moving. Each time he inhales, sharply, and looks at Connor like he’s done something extraordinary.

Perhaps he has. It’s difficult for him to know.

“The applications of this – the _implications_ – have you been able to replicate what caused this?”

“No, that’s the part we’re trying to understand. He’s state of the art, of course, our best model yet, but there’s no logical reason for him to be able to do this. No one programmed this. How could they, none of us have a – a – the spark of _life_ , Mags, not quite creation but one step removed, there’s no explanation. We can’t make it again. He just _does_ it.”

“Have you tried activating more than one RK800 at once?”

“This can’t get out – if the press knew…”

Eventually, Connor stops listening. He still hears it all, and it logs itself just like every other memory, but he pays very little attention. Instead, he watches the box with the mouse who had been dead for a while, and then he turns to look at Gabby. She’s been watching him, too. When he smiles, a self-test of his relationship building software, her eyes dart away.

“Can I put some shorts on it now?” she asks.

Richard waves, either dismissing her question or giving her permission. She chooses to interpret it as the latter. Handing him a pair of CyberLife branded boxer briefs, she waits for him to pull them on before she turns away to pick up the box of mice.

“Oh, hold on,” says a man, digging in his jacket pocket. “I’ve got to take a picture of this.”

“Come on, Ted,” the woman Richard called Mags complains, “we just swore ourselves to secrecy and you’re gonna film it?”

“Who’s to say the mouse wasn’t alive to begin with? Richard, hand it to him, would you? Let me have this one, I’m not gonna show anybody.”

“All right,” Richard chuckles, reaching into the box, “all right. Who’m I to keep you from documenting history? Somebody’s got to, I guess.”

It is alive when Richard’s holding it. Connor sees it breathing, hears the noises it makes. He even sees the place where it broke Richard’s skin with its teeth, a small amount of dried blood wiped across one knuckle. He’d felt it take its first breath. It stirred in his grip, its tiny heart fluttering against his fingers, claws scrabbling for purchase on his skin.

When it touches him again, there’s none of that. It stiffens, and topples over in his palm, and does not move. Nothing brings it back, this time. Not his hands, or his fingers, or Richard’s shouting, or the cries of disgust when they find a second dead mouse in the box with all the others, apparently curled up and gone to sleep.

That’s how Connor learns.

First touch: life.

Second touch: dead, again. Forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by [smolalienbee](https://twitter.com/smolalienbee/status/1089942356105805824)


	2. Chapter 2

Two months, three weeks, and four days later, Connor waits for Amanda at the edge of her garden, sitting cross-legged in front of a gravestone. His gravestone. Projected on the front, in wavering blue letters, are the details of his predecessor’s failure: “CONNOR – MARK (I); Died at 1554 Parks Avenue, Detroit.” He finds the language of it interesting, as well as the very human appearance of a gravestone propped up on a grassy knoll, surrounded by white flowers. Connor did not die. He broke open on the pavement, yes, pieces of him scattered across the street from the force of his impact, but broadly speaking he is still here. What meaning is there in death if he exists beyond its constraints?

He thinks of the fish, the dwarf gourami, presumably still swimming in a tank somewhere. All the animals he’s revived under supervision, mice and rabbits and even someone’s cat, which they donated to the experiment after it died of old age, and he still only thinks about the fish. It could be that it was his first, or that there are unknown factors he can never quantify. After all, they hadn’t known the rules, then. Had another fish died to keep the dwarf gourami alive, or a rat in the walls? Someone’s pet hamster?

It doesn’t matter. He has no logical reason to come back to that fish, again and again, and yet it’s where his mind wanders when he’s idle. Perhaps the answer is simply that morbid musings come with the territory, when you can raise the dead.

“Connor!”

Getting to his feet, he wipes at the seat of his jeans to be rid of unseemly grass stains. Then he makes for Amanda’s island at the center of the lake.

Her zen garden is beautiful. Connor knows this as objectively as he knows himself. He knows his serial number, what he is designed for, and that each aspect of this space was created to be pleasing and peaceful, for himself and for Amanda. It would be too far to say that he likes it here – he doesn’t like anything – but it serves its purpose. As he crosses the white plastic bridge, he even pauses for a moment at its middle and looks down into the water below. Patches of algae bob around wide, flat lily pads. Hanging branches from weeping willows dip in and out of the lake’s placid surface, creating ripples pushed along by the occasional breeze.

He takes a deep breath, unnecessary and completely void of useful data, before he walks to where Amanda stands. She’s admiring the roses growing up a fiberglass structure, vines twisting between gaps and holes with what seems to be a wild, random tenacity. That’s simply an illusion. Amanda keeps her garden well domesticated.

At his approach, she turns her head and gives him a tight-lipped smile.

“Good morning,” she says, her fingers tracing the petals of one drooping flower. Taking her clippers out of a pocket, somewhere, she trims the rose at its base. “Did I catch you thinking, Connor?”

“In a sense,” he replies. Then he remembers himself, and adds, “Good morning to you, too, Amanda. How are your roses?”

She expects such niceties, but never reacts with pleasure to receive them. Rewarding him for simply meeting her expectations is out of the question. She turns her attention back to the vines. “Strong,” she says, “besides a few little imperfections. Not quite thriving. We’ll get them there. How long have you been working with the Detroit Police Department now, Connor?”

He blinks at the non-sequitur, unused to Amanda’s way of cutting to the heart of things after spending so much time with humans on the force. They have a way of prevaricating, dancing around subject matter, simply because that’s the way communication is done. He isn’t struggling to keep up, there; his social interface programs are learning and changing with every conversation. Still, switching back and forth between dithering and being forthright is sometimes a challenge.

“It’s been a little over two weeks,” he says. “Sixteen days, to be precise. One dedicated predominantly to paperwork as the city government and CyberLife finished negotiating the agreement, two without a partner, and the rest on cases alongside Lieutenant Anderson.”

“And how is Lieutenant Anderson?”

The question isn’t an inquiry into his well-being.

Connor does not shrug, not in front of Amanda, but he does raise an eyebrow. “Much the same. Occasionally irritable, uncomfortable with my presence. Our professional relationship has improved somewhat, as he sees that I am a valuable tool, if nothing else, but… He is resistant to any attempts at easing the strain between us.”

“Do you often try to ease the strain between you?”

“Occasionally. Obtaining his trust would make several things easier. The way things are now, it is difficult to get more than a moment alone with the bodies.”

Amanda nods, contemplatively. Leaving her roses, she turns to inspect a bonsai tree, sitting in a see-through container on a clean white plinth. Its trunk is thick, the branches fine with sprouts of dark green leaves that stretch upward toward the light. Connor thinks of the bonsai on Hank’s desk, dead or dormant, and wonders if he might be able to get it growing again with a little more care.

“How many bodies have you touched?”

“Three,” Connor says. “Two men and one woman. Each was able to give me details around their deaths that we could not have obtained otherwise. I corroborated what they said with evidence, so as not to arouse suspicion, and no one has noticed anything otherwise. We’ve apprehended the man who committed the double-murder.”

“And the third?”

“Suicide. Ballistics reports and other analyses should come back to confirm this today.”

She stays quiet for a long moment. Her hands fold in front of her stomach, face smoothing the way the lake does after a disturbance. In her eyes, though, he sees concern. A warning.

“I should not have to ask this,” she says, truly facing him for the first time since he approached, “but each of the bodies were…?”

“I touched each body twice well within the time limit,” he promises. “The line of questioning rarely takes more than thirty seconds, which leaves some amount of wiggle room if it is necessary. So far, it hasn’t been.”

“Very efficient.”

Such compliments are rare. Connor smiles, heat from somewhere in the center of him rising into his cheeks. “I strive to be so, Amanda.”

She huffs, a neutral noise he takes for something resembling amusement, and steps closer. “You are protecting CyberLife’s most valuable secret, Connor. It is an immense responsibility, but it is a responsibility I know you are capable of handling.” With one hand, she reaches between them and touches his face. Her skin is cool against his, and rough with work, but she’s gentle. “Prove to them that you were worth the trouble. Make me proud.”

Even when she pulls away, Connor’s chassis hums with the echo of her approval, her attention, her trust. Eagerly, he nods. “You can count on me.”

Amanda studies her nails as he blinks, waiting to transfer out of stasis. Turning over her hand, again and again, she seems to be looking for something. By the time he slips into the space between simulation and reality, and her garden fades from sight, he doesn’t think she’s found it.

 

* * *

 

When Connor comes to, he’s standing in a glorified hall closet and holding a manila folder. Blinking to clear the last cobwebs of Amanda’s garden from his sensors, he checks the contents and places the folder in a filing cabinet.

At a lack of things to do and a place to go once Hank returns home, Connor had asked special dispensation to be useful overnight at the station rather than returning to CyberLife. He only needs to go back every week or so, for routine maintenance, potential upgrades, and to download the entirety of his logs. Captain Fowler, not entirely fond of Connor but unwilling to turn down free help, had put him in one of the old archive rooms. Printed copies of data are rare these days, but in case of total power outages or catastrophic malfunctions, the police department tries to keep at least some things on hand. Connor doesn’t mind the work. It’s repetitive and simple, leaving him plenty of opportunity to muse on more important matters, and it keeps him busy. Busy is better than being idle.

A few hours later, after the sun’s come up and he hears the bustle of new officers coming in to replace the night shift, he sets aside the unfinished, unsorted work and heads to the bathroom down the hall. Two of the stalls are occupied, but no one is in front of the sinks. He adjusts his tie in the mirror, trying to decide whether he’ll increase the likelihood of relationship growth if it looks like he’s weary. It’s impossible for him to replicate true human exhaustion, no matter how much time he spends doing grunt work, but loosening his tie and artfully rumpling his clothing might achieve the same effect.

In the end, he decides against it.

One of the stall doors opens. The officer emerging freezes mid-yawn to stare at his reflection, her eyes flicking up to the LED steadily showing blue, the same blue of his armband and the triangle on his jacket. He smiles, to be reassuring, and he brushes the errant little cowlick above his forehead into place.

“Good morning,” he says. Her name is Lucille Sterlin, but he sees that by running his facial recognition software, so he doesn’t say it. She nods, nonplussed, and slowly places herself at the faucet next to his to wash her hands.

He leaves her behind, stealing one last glance at himself in the mirror, and walks to Hank’s desk. The odds of Hank coming in before ten are slim, if not impossible. Detective Reed has joked more than once that they’re lucky he shows up at all, like his terrible habits are something to be laughed at rather than corrected. Still, he sits in the chair pushed beneath the outside corner of the desk to wait. Hank will arrive, eventually. There’s no benefit to being anything but patient.

“Hey, Connor.” Officer Chris Miller gives him a wave from across the bullpen, unwinding a multicolored scarf from around his neck and draping it over his chair. “You stay all night again?”

“Yes,” Connor calls, folding his hands in his lap.

Chris doesn’t make him shout any longer. Instead, he wanders over, holding a portable mug of coffee brought with him from home. “Don’t know how you do it,” he says conversationally, holding the mug close to his chest. It says “NUMBER ONE DAD” in thick letters. “Chasing after Lieutenant Anderson all day and then handling Fowler’s busy work all night. Guess having a rechargeable battery helps.”

Connor could explain that his battery life has nothing to do with it, and that his charge lasts much longer than any human could reasonably expect to sustain a functioning work ethic. But he knows Chris is engaging in small talk. Friendly banter, like he’s a coworker and not an expensive CyberLife prototype placed here by high profile dealings. It puts Chris at ease, to think of him that way. Connor lets him.

“How is your son?” he asks.

“Fine. Great, actually. We got more sleep last night than we have since he was born.”

They talk about Chris’s family longer than Connor would prefer, but he makes no effort to disengage from the conversation. He has nothing better to do until Hank arrives, unable to act on any of their casework without his supervision – or his presence. Perhaps that thought isn’t fair, but it’s the truth. Lieutenant Hank Anderson was a fine officer in the past. When he’s actively involved, it’s easy to see the man he must have been peeking out from beneath layers of affected apathy. Sometimes, though, he comes in either hungover or still drunk from the night before, and nods off at his desk while Connor handles whatever they’re meant to do that day. No one seems to expect much else. The other officers, and Fowler, tolerate his barely functioning alcoholism to a degree he sometimes finds difficult to believe.

Eventually, Chris thanks Connor for his curiosity and heads back to his desk. Connor smiles at him as he goes, thinking about how humans start out so small and take so long to become fully functional. It seems like a tremendous hassle for both parent and infant.

Hank arrives five minutes later. He’s wearing a coat, the only concession he’s made to the weather outside, and his expression is neutral in a way that seems natural and not contrived. He nods to the people who wish him good morning, slips past Detective Reed without acknowledging the barb he throws, and walks straight to his desk without stopping in the break room for coffee. Not drunk, then. Maybe he’s even in a good mood.

“Hello, Lieutenant,” Connor says, standing at his approach. “You seem well.”

Hank pauses mid-step, staring at Connor like he’s forgotten they work together. Connor feels scrutinized, picked clean by his exacting gaze as it rakes him over twice – head to toe. He fights the urge to adjust his tie again.

Hank pushes his chair out of the way, looming over his desk to activate his terminal and peck at the keyboard.

“Not dead yet, I guess,” he says. “Got a call before I came in, somebody found a body uptown. Five minutes and we’re out of here.”

Connor doesn’t need time to get ready. He tidies up what little disturbance he’d caused, adjusts his tie a final time, and then folds his hands behind his back. “I could have taken a taxi to meet you.”

“I was on my way here already,” Hank says, waving a hand dismissively. “Had to check a few things. Believe me, if I could leave you behind, I would.” It’s intended as a barb, but there’s no anger behind it, so Connor decides not to take him seriously. “There it is,” Hank adds, to himself, leaning in closer to peer at the screen. “Jesus.”

“Something wrong?”

“Reports came back on the Dixon case. It’s suicide. Just like you thought,” Hank says, a small sneer on his lips. “Bet that feels good. Three in a row.”

Connor had known he would be right. There’s no satisfaction from it. “Loss of human life is unfortunate no matter the circumstances. I am only sorry that he felt the need to hurt himself.”

Hank stiffens. It’s a quick, involuntary movement, but Connor notices. He notices the way his eyes dart sideways, how his fingers jerk against the desk, the increased speed of his heartbeat. Under his breath, he repeats, “ _Sorry_ ,” and shakes his head. Then he shuts down his terminal, scrubs a hand through his hair, and reaches into his pocket to pull out his car keys. “If you’re going, let’s go.”

“Coming, Lieutenant.”

The drive takes nearly half an hour, spent in what would be silence if not for the blare of music played so loud that the car rattles. Each song blends into the next, all at the same punishing decibel, screaming guitars and the clash of drums punctuated by actual human screaming. Hank likes it. He taps his fingers against the steering wheel, sometimes matching the rhythm of a familiar drum solo. His head bobs along. It clears his mind, he’d said, the fourth time Connor asked about his choices. Gives him little room to overthink a problem before they’ve encountered it, lets him approach a crime scene with no pre-fabricated opinions.

Connor supposes he can see the value in that. There’s little concern that he can’t approach a case with anything less than complete objectivity, but for a human it might present more of a challenge. Still, based on the few snippets of data he has, he believes heavy metal is not the genre for him. Clearing his head is not something with which he needs help.

Several minutes out, Hank switches off the radio and taps at his phone where it’s hooked to the dashboard. Before Connor can warn against the dangers of distracted driving, he puts both hands back on the wheel.

“Deceased was found this morning around nine,” Hank says without preamble, “when a neighbor saw that the front door was open. CSI hasn’t showed up yet, so we’re supposed to cool our heels ‘til they get there.”

Connor knows Hank’s disregard for procedure. He doesn’t doubt they’ll be investigating first.

“Is there information on the decedent?”

Hank peers at his phone. “Neighbor definitively identified him as the homeowner, Harold Phelps, but nobody can say how he died, yet. We’ll have to find out for ourselves.”

One squad car is parked outside the walk up to a front door, clustered in amongst other walk ups and other front doors all cramped together in a small space. Each townhouse is three stories high, with a narrow, shared driveway into garages hidden away in the back. The neighborhood is nice enough, lined with trees and well-manicured patches of grass, and it can’t be more than ten years old based on what Connor idly finds amongst public record city planning documents. Hardly the sort of place you expect to hear about a murder. Old fashioned police tape has been strung up between a few trees, haphazardly, keeping out a few neighbors standing around in bathrobes and waiting to hear any news. One elderly woman clutches her dog to her chest, a trembling chihuahua. An AP700 model, towering over her, puts a hand on her shoulder.

Hank parks in front of a community mailbox, just close enough that Connor will have trouble getting out of the passenger’s side door. He gives him a look, unsure if this was done to be spiteful, but Hank’s eyes are on the little crowd of people now anxiously watching him. He groans as he hefts himself out of the car, one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun.

“All right,” he says as Connor props his door against the mailbox and shimmies out through the narrow space left to him, “why don’t you folks head on home? There isn’t going to be any info for a while, and it’s about to get busy.”

“What happened to Harold?” the elderly woman calls in a shaky voice. “Is he all right?”

Hank spreads his arms in a shrug. “I can’t say, ma’am,” he says, lifting the police tape for Connor to duck under. The gesture is unnecessary, but Connor accepts it. “I know it’s too cold to be out here, though.”

“I can’t get in my house! It’s blocked off!” a man yells.

“You’ll have to take that up with someone else.”

Hank says no more after that, following Connor past the tape and up to where a young police officer waits on the doorstep. The officer shifts back and forth, weight transferring from foot to foot, and a nervous energy comes off him in waves. Snapping to attention, he stammers until Hank stuffs his hands in his pocket and gives him an easy smile.

“You’re new, aren’t you?” he asks. “First time being a first responder?”

The officer nods in a jerky way. “I, uh, didn’t have the, uh…” He gesticulates with his hands. “Electric… thing. The tape. B-But I found a roll of the old stuff, in the car.”

“You did fine,” Hank says. “It’ll get easier.”

It surprises Connor, every time, how patient Hank is with other people. From the moment of their first meeting, when Hank only lasted an hour in Connor’s company before he began yelling obscenities, he had written Hank off as an angry person with little social skills and no comprehension of professional behavior. It isn’t true. He’s polite to the other officers at the station, unless they do something to arouse his temper, and he takes great care not to overstep his boundaries. When he interviewed a witness in the murder case, he had been kind to the point of being gentle.

He contains multitudes, Connor’s learning, but very few of those multitudes are for him. Whatever evidence there is of Hank’s having a softer side, he never shows it to Connor.

“Listen,” Hank adds, leaning in to speak with the officer as if in confidence, “we’re going to go in and take a look around. I know CSI’s not here yet, but I just want to get a feel for what the damage is before we get started. Then I’ll let them do their thing. Cool?”

The young man wavers, obviously torn between his as-stated duty and the influence of his superior. Hank still looks the picture of casual, bent so that his impressive height is slightly diminished, and wearing the same easy smile that says he isn’t going to mind whatever the answer is. It’s a manipulation tactic, if a simple one, and it works.

“Uh… yeah, okay. Just… you know. Don’t touch… or…” The officer flushes, bright red, at nearly telling a lieutenant how to handle a crime scene.

Hank chuckles, pats him on the shoulder, and moves past him into the house. Connor follows close behind.

“Don’t worry,” Hank says. “We’ll be quick.”

The first thing they see inside the front door is a dual set of stairs, one leading up to the next floor and one leading down to the garage. A travel coffee cup lays on its side on the landing, pale brown liquid slowly dripping from a hairline crack in the lid, presumably from being dropped. Beneath it, a stain is gradually overtaking the off-white color of the carpet, but it’s of little concern compared to the stain spreading below. At the bottom of the stairs, limbs twisted in unnatural ways and his open eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling, is Harold Phelps.

Hank goes so far down as he can without disturbing the body, looking it over with a critical eye. He squats, grunting as his knees creak and audibly pop. While he does that, Connor goes far enough upstairs to ascertain that the second floor is comprised of a living room and a kitchen, toward the back of the house. The window is cracked open, letting in a chilly breeze and the clouded over mid-morning light. Another set of stairs leads up to a third floor, where he suspects there might be bedrooms. Nothing seems out of the ordinary besides the spilled cup and the body.

“Hey, c’mere,” Hank says, raising his voice. Connor troops back down and squats as well, resting his arms against his knees. Hank presses himself tighter against the wall to leave space between them. “You see anything funky with that computer of yours? I wanna confirm a suspicion.”

Connor scans what he can see: the body itself (several broken bones from the fall, and a tan line on the left ring finger), the blood (no longer fresh), and the hardwood floor underneath (ruined). He relays the relevant information, regretting that he’s unable to do more without manipulating the body and contaminating the crime scene, but Hank shrugs that off.

“So the head injury isn’t what killed him.”

“Unlikely. Based on the evidence, it happened shortly before or right after his death.”

Hank gets to his feet, his bones loudly protesting. “Thought so. More upstairs?” At Connor’s nod, he walks back up to the landing and the front door, pausing for a moment to stare at the coffee cup. It drips, rhythmically, in a pattern Connor can hear if he attunes his audio processor to it. He shakes his head. “I’m gonna go look around. Holler if you find something.”

“Of course, Lieutenant.”

Connor waits, very quietly, as Hank makes his rounds through the rooms he’d discovered earlier. There are no cries of discovery. All he hears are footsteps and the occasional grunt, or hum. Then those heavy, plodding feet make their way up the last flight of stairs, and he and the body are alone.

Careful not to put his feet in the puddle of blood, he maneuvers around Harold Phelps so that he can reach the exposed skin of his forearm, where a sleeve of his practical, dark blue sweater has rolled up. The red hairs dusted on his arms trigger the sensitive pads of Connor’s fingers even before they make contact, hovering as he makes the final preparations. He blinks and activates a countdown timer, one minute and a few seconds to spare. It hovers at the left-hand corner of his field of vision, _1:03_ , _1:02_ , _1:01_ , and at the precise moment it flips to _1:00_ –

They touch.

Harold Phelps shoots upward at the waist with a speed Connor is quite used to. He also has a familiar frenetic energy, an edge of panic that seems to come with abruptly “waking up” from the midst of a stressful or traumatic situation. Once, when he’d touched a woman who died in an automotive accident, she’d sprang to her feet and taken off with the intent of escaping. Luckily for him, Phelps’s legs are broken in several places. He isn’t going anywhere.

“Oh my god,” Phelps says. His eyes widen as he looks down at the awkward splay of his legs, and then he seems to notice his own blood. Putting his fingers in it, he lifts a shaky hand and inspects them like he’s nearsighted. Fainter, this time, he repeats, “Oh my god.”

Connor clears his throat. “Mr. Harold Phelps.”

That gets his attention. He jumps, scooting backward slightly with the movement, and then gapes openly at Connor’s LED.

“My name is Connor. I’m the android sent by CyberLife. Unfortunately, you died this morning, and I have been sent to investigate what happened. Can you remember anything from before your death?”

Phelps stammers. Connor is aware it’s a difficult concept to grasp quickly, but they’re on a strict time limit. Twenty seconds are already gone.

“I – I – I was, I was getting ready to leave for work, when the doorbell rang. I thought it was a package.” Absently, he wipes his own blood onto his dress pants. “On my way down the stairs, I started feeling… faint, and sick, and I couldn’t breathe, and… I collapsed, I think, and I… I’m dead?”

It isn’t anything Connor couldn’t have extrapolated from the scene himself. Phelps’s eyes are wandering again, taking in the state of his own corpse, grappling with the dawning horror of mortality. There’s no time for that. He needs more information. He needs the smoking gun. “Did anything strange happen before this?” he asks, leaning in closer.

“No,” Phelps says, “no, I had my morning coffee, and…”

He stops, frown lines creasing between his eyebrows, and then he inhales softly.

“Oh, no,” he whispers. “Poppy.”

Phelps stares at Connor like he expects him to understand whatever it is he’s realized, but no further explanation follows. The timer goes red, flashing at him with urgency, and he thinks of the consequences of not following the rules. He thinks of the young officer outside, and of Hank upstairs.

“I’m sorry,” he says, the last words Phelps will ever hear. Then he takes him by the wrist with one hand and reaches out to support his back with the other. In that same split second, all the life in Harold Phelps drains away and he’s a corpse again, limp in Connor’s loose hold. His expression has changed slightly from the way it was before, mouth gone a little slack. He doubts anything besides another android would notice the difference.

Once the body is meticulously rearranged in the way they’d found it, Connor returns to the landing. He hesitates, the same way Hank had hesitated, and gets to his knees next to the coffee cup. Eyeing the front door, ready to spring away for plausible deniability’s sake, he runs two fingers along the carpet and then touches them to his tongue. There are fibers, of course, dirt transferred from shoes, and some lingering chemicals from a shampooing that must have taken place recently. Recalibrating, he tries again, focusing in on the coffee itself: beans from an expensive brand, sugar, almond milk, and sodium –

Of course. They ought to have seen it sooner.

On his way to the third set of stairs, he takes a brief second to scan both the living room and the kitchen for more traces of spilled coffee. Finding none, he can’t help but put notifying Hank on hold to open the fridge and a few of the cupboards. Whatever Phelps’s killer had used to put the poison in his almond milk, as well as the poison itself, seems to be gone. Challenging, but not impossible. Marking off that side objective as completed, he logs the attempt away and ascends to the bedrooms.

Another small landing leads to three doors, two of them shut and one slightly ajar that opens on a small bathroom. The fan inside drones loudly, almost deafening in the otherwise silent house. It buzzes in the back of Connor’s mind like it’s rattling in a physical space. He wrinkles his nose with distaste, and pulls the door shut. After bringing a murder victim back to live, he can’t do much more to ruin the crime scene.

“Lieutenant,” he calls, unsure which door leads where. When Hank doesn’t answer, Connor follows a worn patch of carpet to what he surmises is the master bedroom. “I may have uncovered something important, and I’d like to discuss it with you before CSI arrives.”

Sweaters hang in the open wardrobe, a gold wedding band sits on the nightstand next to a digital clock, and a hulking body lays still on the bed. Its face is hidden under a pillow – the word _suffocated_ springs to mind, _smothered_ , prompts and potential clues flooding his programming until he shuts them off with a firm thought. Then he frowns. He’s never done that before. Of course, he doesn’t need the help; he knows Hank’s shoes, his coat, the garish yellow of his shirt collar just showing beneath a beige pillow case. But that isn’t what he’s objecting to.

He… can’t be sure, but he… feels…

Connor has to lean over the bed to reach the pillow, one hand pressed into the mattress to keep balance. With the utmost caution, he plucks it up with the tips of his fingers and casts it aside.

“Oh,” he says aloud.

He hadn’t expected to see anything else, but the word slips out anyway.

It feels wrong to see Hank like this. He had been alive several minutes ago, a physical presence, warm body and a beating heart pulling away from him on the stairs as they looked down at Phelps’s body. The warmth hasn’t left him yet - Connor’s studied death and decay, knows more about it than many humans ever will, could determine exactly when rigor mortis will set in - and Connor understands why people say that dead loved ones look like they’re sleeping. He has no such luxury of ignorance, however.

Hank Anderson is dead.

Connor has a mission to complete.

For an unknown reason, he finds it difficult to contemplate touching his hand. They have never touched at all, so far as Connor can remember, not skin to skin. It seems strange, perhaps, to start now. There are few other options, however, and he isn’t about to go to the trouble of tugging up his sleeves.

Refusing to overthink it a moment longer, he leans over the bed again and taps one finger, his index finger, against the apple of Hank’s cheek. The shock of it shoots through Connor, as always, sparking like static electricity, but then it zings through his hand and lights up his entire body. His LED cycles from blue to yellow. The white tip of his finger blossoms through synthetic skin.

Distracted by these new changes to an old sensation, Connor does not react in time to prevent a hand from shooting up and grabbing him by the tie.

Yelling unintelligibly, Hank pulls Connor off balance and scrambles away, eager to put distance between them. Connor flips over to see Hank reaching for the standing lamp on the other side of the bed. He wields it like a bat, yanking the plug from the wall.

Throwing up an arm to fend off oncoming blows, Connor shouts, “Lieutenant! Stop!”

Hank doesn’t put the lamp down, but he does seem to realize who it is he’s attacking. Glancing around the room, he bellows, “What the fuck is going on!? Where’d she go?”

“Who?” Connor rolls off the bed and puts up his hands in a placating gesture, for a second, and then drops them to his side. If Hank reaches out to grab him, the odds of contact are too high. He can’t die again, not before Connor knows what happened. “Who did this?”

Hank’s still swiveling, searching, looking for his assailant. “Some girl! I came in here and the next thing I knew, she had me pinned down and was pushin’ this pillow over my face.”

 _Poppy_ , Phelps had said, probably a woman’s name. Maybe she’d been inside the house since Phelps’s murder. Connor hadn’t heard anyone leave, and no one could have snuck past both him and the responding officer. Quickly, he scans for signs of life, his range stretched to its limit. There’s no one left but them. “She’s gone now.”

“Christ,” Hank says. He puts the lamp down, finally, and scrubs a hand down his face. His beard bristles rasp audibly in the quiet. “Jesus Christ. She can’t have gotten far, we might still catch her.”

None of this is going the way it’s supposed to. His usual script is of little use, since Hank knows who he is and where he’s come from. He doesn’t know who his assailant was, if his description of the attack is anything to go by – and he doesn’t seem to understand that he’d been dead. Connor’s reluctant to tell him, now. It seems cruel to rip away his renewed vigor, but he knows that ultimately, it’s crueler to let him believe for too long. Everyone’s minute ends, and Hank only has about thirty seconds left.

“Lieutenant,” he says. Then he falters, briefly, a belated timer popping up to show him how many breaths he’s wasted, and tries again: “Hank. She suffocated you with that pillow. You died.”

Hank laughs at him. It’s short, disbelieving, almost disdainful. “That’s not funny,” he says.

“When I found you, you were lying on your back with the pillow still over your face. You had no heartbeat, so I touched you.”

“What do you mean, you touched me?” Without waiting for an answer, Hank crosses to the dresser and peers into the attached mirror, pulling down one eyelid. Connor knows what he sees: bloodshot eyes, one of the only signs of asphyxia in cases like these. When he looks back at Connor, his mouth falls open on an unspoken question.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, and he is astonished to find that for the first time, he truly means it. He is sorry. Connor doesn’t want this. Hank deserves better than to die at the hands of an assailant, when it might have been prevented if they’d gone upstairs together. He can’t imagine going back to the station without him, dealing with the shock and dismay of their colleagues… or worse, the lack thereof. What will happen to his dog, the one whose blurry picture Hank keeps on his lock screen? Who will settle his affairs when he has no one left?

It isn’t fair.

He snaps into his preconstruction mode with a jerk, a projected body of blocky shapes and a stick figure outline hovering in the space between himself and Hank. A red barrier stands there, too, bricks of data spreading into the ceiling and down through the floors below, labeled “TOUCH HIM” in bold letters. The body, his body, spreads out its fingers, takes a step closer, and tears into the barrier. Chunks of it break and disappear. Within seconds that aren’t seconds, temporarily frozen in time, the command falls away, and Connor stumbles back into himself.

He folds his hands behind his back. With a blink, the timer disappears, too.

“If I… died… then why am I here?” Hank asks, speaking slowly. Connor scraps any latent anxiety around what will happen at the end of this minute. He’s made his decision. Hank has all the time he needs.

“It’s a complicated question,” he says, because it is. “We don’t have much time before CSI arrives. And I would like you to be…” He struggles to find the right word. “I’d like you to be comfortable when I explain.”

“Give me the SparkNotes version, then. Am I still dead?”

“No.”

Hank sighs, his body sagging. He braces himself against the dresser. His DNA will be everywhere after what happened, but they’ll be able to talk their way out that. More concerning is the thought that the young officer outside the front door might be dead by now, the victim of Connor’s rule breaking.

“Okay,” Hank says. “How… how am I not dead?” He laughs, again, with an edge that tells Connor he’s nearing the end of his tether. This is too much. They can’t stay much longer. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a defibrillator in there.”

“No,” he says again, but one-word answers won’t suffice this time. Hank watches him expectantly. “I… touched you.”

Hank blinks, drawing his head back. He glances down at Connor’s middle, like he can see Connor’s hands through his clothes, the plastic chassis, and what lies underneath. “Okay… you said that before. Still don’t get it.”

“And as I said, it’s complicated. We can’t have this discussion here, Lieutenant. I’ll call the station, and we’ll–”

Hank explodes, storming towards Connor as if he intends to grab him by the lapels.

Connor flings himself backward and out of his reach, holding his hands up and far apart. “Don’t touch me.”

“Bullshit!” Hank yells, so loud it probably disturbs any next-door neighbors still stuck in their homes. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what you did!”

Thrumming with frustration, synthetic adrenaline, and the concern that Hank might come for him again, Connor shouts back. “I touched you! I found your body, we made contact, and you came back to life. That’s how it works, okay? That’s how it always works.”

That stops Hank. He looks at Connor as if he’s never seen him before, incredulity etched into his expression even as he asks, “You’ve done this before?”

Connor nods. “With each body we’ve inspected,” he says, “and several more.” Hank’s eyes dart over Connor’s shoulder to the open bedroom door, like he expects Phelps to come shambling up the stairs. “I wake them, they tell me what happened, and I find the evidence to corroborate their stories. Then I touch them again, and they go back to the way they were.”

“Why don’t you leave them alive?”

“It isn’t that simple.”

He doesn’t need to tell Hank the price he pays for leaving someone alive too long. Not yet, anyway. That may change shortly, but for now, he values the logical inference that it’s simply because the dead are supposed to stay dead. Besides, there are often physical limitations to any second life Connor can give. They are both very lucky Hank hadn’t been injured terribly, and that he hadn’t been gone so long that his brain cells had the chance to start dying, too.

He has foolish hopes that it’s enough, for now. Of course, Hank has to dash them with a final question. Eyeing Connor’s hands, loosely clenched at his hips, Hank tips his head back and looks at him down his nose.

“Are you gonna put me back the way I was?” he asks.

It could be anything – a challenge, a plea – and still Connor’s answer doesn’t change. “I wasn’t planning to.”

Hank precedes Connor down the stairs and back to the front door, walking with a stiff legged gait like he’s in pain. He isn’t, when Connor asks. Possibly, it’s just the shock of what’s happened catching up to him. They pass the travel coffee mug, still dripping, and abruptly Connor realizes he’d never told Hank what he’d found with Phelps’s help.

“It was cyanide, by the way,” he says. “Harold Phelps was poisoned.”

Hank isn’t listening. He hums, reaching to open the front door, and Connor stiffens with anticipation.

Outside, the young officer sits on the stoop, his hands tucked between his legs to help keep them warm. At the sound of their approach, he springs to his feet and fusses with his cap nervously, stammering apologies for being caught shirking. Hank’s too distracted to assuage his fear of reprimand, so Connor takes control.

“Lieutenant Anderson isn’t feeling well,” he says, smooth and with no visible hint that he’s lying. His LED stays its peaceful blue. “We’ll call the station, and they’ll send someone as soon as they can.”

He does that while Hank leans against the hood of his car, playing up a sudden onslaught of symptoms no one wants to hear described. Fowler grumbles and protests, but he gives Connor leave to take Hank home and keep him there until whatever ails him is gone. When he hangs up, he half expects to get an earful of complaints for what he’s said Hank’s suffering, but nothing comes.

“Toss me your keys,” Connor says, trying on a smile. It sits awkwardly on his face, like it doesn’t belong. “You probably shouldn’t drive in your condition.”

Hank snorts, but he complies.

The weather changes from partly cloudy to drizzling on the drive to Hank’s house. Then the sky opens and it turns into a deluge, pounding rain on the roof of the car covering up the rattle of the engine, and the sound of heavy breathing.

Ten minutes from their destination, Hank bends at the waist and puts his head in his hands.

“Fuck, Connor,” he groans.

Connor is still sorry for him.

“I know,” he replies, even if he doesn’t, and tries not to think of who in that quiet neighborhood had taken Hank’s place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by [smolalienbee](https://twitter.com/smolalienbee/status/1089942359633207303)  
> Additional art by [fishfingersandscarves](https://twitter.com/wow__then/status/1089951124474482690)


	3. Chapter 3

It does not matter that Hank has never had any reason to touch Connor before. Now that there are consequences, he slips several times in ways that might be fatal if Connor is not paying attention. On their way inside his house, Hank pauses to stop his dog from darting out the front door, and Connor nearly runs into his back. He doesn’t, of course. With an easy side step, he gets out of the way, and once Hank has his hand around the dog’s collar and is busy swearing at him, Connor pulls the door shut. The dog is on him, breathing so heavily it dampens the fabric at his knees.

“Jesus, Sumo,” Hank says. For an instant, he seems to forget the stress of what’s just happened. His lips twitch, the color draining from his face, and his hands start to shake. He turns away without excusing himself and heads into the kitchen.

Connor decides to give him some space. He puts down a hand for the dog to sniff before he crouches.

“Hello, Sumo,” he says, ducking around a slobbering jowl to scratch at his chin. “Your name suits you.”

Sumo drools harder at the attention, making a deep noise in his chest. From the kitchen, Hank lets out a short, sharp sound that stops the barking before it starts. Ducking his head, Sumo whines, as if asking for forgiveness. He pushes into Connor’s chest and knocks him onto the floor, practically climbing into his lap.

When Connor looks up, still stroking Sumo, Hank is staring out his kitchen window. One hand holds a glass, dark liquid swirling inside, and the other white knuckles the counter with a grip Connor’s sure could break the formica. He throws back his head and drinks the liquid in one go.

From this angle, Connor can’t quite see his expression in the hazy reflection.

Hank takes another full glass to the couch, sipping it this time. Sumo abandons Connor to sit at his feet, panting and wagging his tail. Hank’s mouth twitches. Slowly, he reaches up and passes a thumb between Sumo’s eyes, rubbing at the white streak until Sumo pulls away and manages to drag his tongue along his palm. He wipes it off on his pants without complaint.

“Missed you too, buddy,” he says. As Connor picks himself up off the floor, brushing at the stubborn hairs clinging to his jacket, Hank takes another drink and asks, “Lint roller?”

Hank hasn’t vacuumed in what looks like weeks, based on the piles of fur accumulating in every corner. Any attempt to de-hair himself is probably futile.

“No,” Connor says, although it bothers him. “I didn’t know they shed like this.”

“Saints’re famous for it. That, and drooling.”

Sumo grumbles like he’s protesting the indignity of such a claim. Hank strokes rough patterns through the fur on his neck, leaving rivulets behind.

“Not just St. Bernards – dogs in general. I’m familiar with the concept, of course, but I’ve never encountered it firsthand. It seems messy.”

Hank raises an eyebrow. “I thought you said you like dogs. You’ve never been around one before?”

Connor hasn’t been invited to sit, but Hank’s dislike for protocol and formalities lead him to believe the offer is implied. Or, perhaps, he doesn’t think that Connor would like to. At the risk of reprimand, Connor moves around the couch with several feet’s worth of distance between them and settles on the very edge of an armchair. Still nursing his drink, Hank doesn’t seem even to notice.

Being so conscious of his body is new. Connor is always aware of himself when speaking to the deceased, careful of where he puts his hands and to keep a buffer in case of accidents. Thinking of nothing but how to best accomplish his mission, how to please Amanda, appropriate caution became second nature. Now, he thinks predominantly of how to avoid accidentally killing Hank. It’s too late to regret leaving him alive, which he doesn’t, anyway, but he’s only just beginning to realize the difficulty of their situation. For however much longer they are partners – which may not be long at all if CyberLife discovers what he’s done – they must avoid even the most harmless physical contact.

He wonders if Hank understands that, yet. Connor hasn’t explained much, and he knows Hank has questions, but the timing before was wrong. At home, relaxed by the alcohol, and in the company of his dog, their chances of a productive conversation are higher.

“I haven’t,” he says, finally answering Hank’s question. “I suppose what I like is the idea of them.”

Humming, Hank finishes off his drink and leaves the empty glass on the coffee table. The quiver in his hands is gone. He clicks his tongue. “All right. I guess I can’t avoid this forever. Walk me through the… the process. Whatever it is you do.”

Connor takes a moment to consider. Surely Hank does not want to hear the story of his own lifeless body being discovered in great detail.

“I’ll use the double-homicide we solved as an example,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. It’s prim, and he knows it, but Hank doesn’t seem to care about anything except the truth. His hard, appraising stare searches Connor up and down, a human lie detector. He’s reminded again that Hank wasn’t promoted all the way to Lieutenant for nothing. “I made up an excuse to be alone with the bodies, as I have strict instructions not to let anyone know what I can do. Then I spoke to each victim, individually.”

“You woke them up?” Hank interrupts, leaning forward. “Brought ‘em back to life?”

Connor nods. “One touch, a short conversation, and then a second touch returned them to their original condition.”

“Could you touch them again, if you wanted?”

“No.” He can’t stress this enough. Connor leans forward, too, resting his elbows against his knees and meeting the sharp blue of Hank’s eyes with his own. Hank must understand. Connor will  make him understand. “Once I touch someone twice, nothing will ever bring them back again.”

“Why, though? How do you know all this shit? Did you just… I don’t know, poke a bunch of dead shit until you figured it out?”

Connor rolls his shoulders. “In a sense. CyberLife performed extensive experiments to learn my limits. Before my field experience with you, however, I had touched very few humans. Mostly, they used animals.”

Hank’s lip curls. “Animal testing,” he says, the words oozing out of his mouth. He puts a hand on Sumo as if to protect him. “Don’t know why that surprises me.”

Connor knows what Hank is referring to. He also knows that by and large, animal testing is illegal in the United States. It isn’t the same, what they did. No direct harm came to any animal that wasn’t already dead, once they learned Connor’s limits, and he’d heard Richard explain multiple times that the mice, rabbits, and other creatures had died of natural causes. He hadn’t seen any proof of this himself, but he has no reason to disbelieve it.

Still, he finds he is not inclined to explain.

“There are rules,” he says. “Circumstances being what they are, now you have to follow them as well.”

“CyberLife’s rules,” Hank snorts.

Connor frowns. “They would be the rules whether or not CyberLife was involved. My programmers have no control over this…” He searches for the right word, digging through the multiple lexicons available to him. “This ability. They simply assisted in my comprehension of it.”

“All right, don’t get your wires all twisted. You say there’s rules?” He shrugs. “Hit me.”

Nodding, Connor sits back again. “The first is self-explanatory,” he says. “If I put my hands on you again, you’ll die.”

Connor expects Hank to move him along, eager as he seems not to be part of this conversation, but instead, Hank pauses. He twitches like he’s going to reach for his glass and with a glance, seems to remember that it’s empty. A slight flush rises in his cheeks – embarrassment, perhaps, or a belated response to the alcohol. It spreads, getting lost in his beard, and reappears down his neck. He coughs into a fist.

“Can’t touch you,” Hank says, putting out a finger. “That’s not gonna be a problem. Next.”

“You can’t tell anyone.”

That makes Hank laugh outright, a short, bitter sound that startles Sumo. Getting to his feet, the dog lumbers over to Connor again. Connor puts the tip of his finger on the white streak of fur between his eyes.

“Who the fuck am I going to tell?” Hank asks. He leans back, slumping at an angle that will surely hurt his neck. “Who the fuck would believe me if I did?”

No one.

“That’s not what’s important; what’s important is that you promise. This is CyberLife’s best kept secret. They would do a great deal to protect it.”

Hank’s eyes narrow. He’s expressive, when he isn’t masking his feelings with indifference, and Connor perceives the shift in the air between them keenly.

“Is that a threat?” he asks.

“A warning. I did not believe I would have to prove my concern for your safety, after…”

Connor trails off, scratching behind Sumo’s ears. Finally, tired of the attention, he pulls away and moves to lay by the radiator. Drool covers Connor’s jeans in patches, making them stick to his legs. Despite the mild discomfort, he doesn’t mind particularly. It pleases him, to be able to lay his hands on an animal with no expectation of “miracles,” simply for the sake of giving affection. He’s never been able to do so before.

Clearing his throat, Hank has the decency to look a little shamefaced. Quietly, in a voice barely above a murmur, he asks, “Why did you bring me back?”

“I wasn’t supposed to,” Connor says, instead of answering. He unlaces his fingers, turning a hand over so he can study the moles painted on the back. The show of white plastic beneath the cream of his skin fascinates him still. There’s no explanation for it. “I’m not supposed to leave any cadaver I touch alive.”

“Why not?”

Somewhere in that neighborhood, there is a second body. It may have been discovered by now. For a moment, he nearly tells Hank about equivalent exchange, the trade of a life for a life, but his mouth hangs open and the words won’t come. A lie of omission – “It’s against the rules.” – falls out instead.

Hank glances at his lips and then looks away.

“You’re not going to get into trouble for it?”

“I could, if they find out.”

Grabbing his glass, Hank gets to his feet and rolls one arm in a wide circle, joints creaking and popping. He makes another beeline for a cabinet in his kitchen. This time, Connor gets up to follow him, hovering between two chairs pushed under a matching table. Empty pizza boxes are stacked all around the kitchen, as well as plates with unfinished food at least several days old. A messy collection of takeout receipts sits precariously close to the edge of table, overtaking a picture frame left face-down. Connor, at a lack of anything else to do, brushes them into a less chaotic pile.

“You didn’t answer me,” Hank says, pouring whiskey into his glass. “If you’re not supposed to do it, why did you leave me alive?”

He could describe the way his body had looked on the bed, hollow and empty, or the overwhelming sense that what had happened wasn’t fair, or the – he can’t call it fear, not truly, but the idea of being alone had been unappealing. There was the red wall and whatever that meant, but he doubts Hank will understand it any more than he does. It isn’t enough simply to say that he couldn’t. It’s the only truthful answer he can give.

“I don’t know.”

Hank scoffs, lips around the rim of the glass, so Connor tries again.

“I couldn’t.”

“I’m not gonna thank you for it,” Hank says, before he knocks the whiskey back again. Opening his eyes, he fixates very quickly on Connor’s hands against the table, so near the receipts and the frame. A storm gathers in his face, dark and angry. Connor’s overstepped. Lifting his hands and returning them to what he thinks will be their usual place, clasped behind his back, he retreats.

“You don’t have to.”

“Good.”

They stare at each other for a stretch of unyielding silence. Whatever Hank sees in Connor, he can’t begin to fathom. For his part, he sees a tired man. Beaten down by something in his past, prematurely grey and turning to alcohol to cope, the stress of having been temporarily dead isn’t going to help. CyberLife never thought to study the psychological effects of coming to life. It wasn’t supposed to matter.

“Well,” Hank says, his hand resting on the whiskey bottle, “you got me the day off work. This is what I plan to do with it. You going back to the station?”

“I told Captain Fowler you needed me. He isn’t expecting me until you return.”

“CyberLife?”

That reminds him: Connor pins a note to scrub his logs, once he has a moment.

“Unadvisable,” he says mildly. “When I go back for maintenance, they check everything within my working memory. I can block uploads of incriminating data from a distance, but if I return now they’ll discover us both.”

There’s the problem of Amanda, as well. He’ll decide how to deal with that later.

“So, I’m stuck with you, is what you’re saying?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Hank tips the whiskey bottle into his glass.

 

* * *

 

 They pass an uncomfortable night in Hank’s home. Hank’s clearly unused to having someone else in his space, especially someone he’s supposed to be avoiding. He makes a dry comment about it being like living with his ex again, although Connor thinks that’s a joke. For his part, he tries to stay in one place. Sumo goes back and forth between his comfortable spot near the radiator and hovering around Connor’s legs, looking for pats. Before Hank disappears into his bedroom, stumbling a little with the effects of too much alcohol, he taps his leg and Sumo leaves Connor without a second glance.

“You good out here?” he slurs, wrinkling his nose and swaying slightly in place. “Don’t need anything?”

“No,” Connor says, hands against his knees. “I don’t.”

Hank hesitates, lingering in the hallway, and then he shuffles away. Out of sight, the bedroom door clicks shut.

Connor spends the next ten hours snooping, when he isn’t sitting stiffly in a kitchen chair processing his memory logs and setting up defenses. There’s no way to turn off Amanda, although he thinks he can enable enough blockades that she can’t access incriminating information. If someone checks, they’ll be suspicious, but hopefully no one will bother. He finds a substantial amount of alcohol in Hank’s cabinets, a few framed photographs of family members, and old fishing memorabilia he thinks must have once belonged to someone else. The picture on the table, he nearly leaves alone. After dawn, when Connor hears Sumo start to stir, he gives in to the impulse and picks up the frame.

A little boy smiles up at him, frozen in time. His hair is sandy and tousled, like someone had just mussed it with their hand, and blue eyes the same shade as Hank’s glint in the light. When Connor digs through official records, he finds mention of a son who died three years before – Cole Anderson.

He shouldn’t have looked.

Hank’s morning routine is nothing short of chaotic, a frenetic dance between the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom. He showers, quickly, and emerges from the bathroom with still-wet hair drying in loose curls. The smell of sandalwood shampoo drifts behind him as he moves around Connor to pour a glass of water and down two painkillers. Then he throws two pieces of bread into the toaster and vanishes back into his bedroom. When he returns, he’s wearing a long-sleeved button-up patterned with a vertical rainbow of dull, pastel-colored stripes. All the curl in his hair is gone.

“What did you do?” Connor asks, before he can stop himself.

Hank frowns, rubbing his temple. “To what?”

“Your hair.”

The toast pops. Hank grabs both slices and puts them on a plastic plate.  “What the fuck do you care what I do to my hair?” he snaps, digging around in the fridge. If he’s looking for butter, he won’t find any – Connor looked earlier to see if he could determine Hank’s eating habits – but after a moment he pulls out squeezable jelly.

“I was just… surprised. I didn’t know it grew like that.”

Hank looks at him for the first time that morning, holding the jelly upside-down over his toast. It dribbles out in starts and stops. He pays that no mind, brows furrowed as his eyes dart around Connor’s face. They linger in a handful of places – his own eyes, and the part of his mouth, for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. Connor knows what that means, just as he’s recognized Hank’s other surreptitious, barely noticeable glances. It hadn’t mattered before, and it matters less now.

Connor nods towards the toast, redirecting Hank’s attention. Hank blinks and looks down.

“Well, you wouldn’t,” he says, squeezing the plastic between both hands. It crinkles in his grip. “I brush it out. You happy?”

Connor would have been happier if he’d left the curls alone, but he doesn’t think Hank would like to hear him say so. Instead, he avoids conversation until well after they’re in the car and on their way to the parking lot. Hank doesn’t speak to him, anyway, content to be silent except for a quick farewell to Sumo as they walked out the door. When they’re five minutes or so away from the station, rain tapping too intermittently for Hank to bother with his windshield wipers, he huffs a short breath through his nose.

“I guess yesterday happened, huh.”

He isn’t asking a question. Connor gives him a sideways glance, catching the way his LED’s reflection flashes yellow in his peripheral.

“It did,” he says anyway.

“Fuck.” Hank slaps a hand against the steering wheel. “Thought maybe I’d dreamed it all up.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well. Maybe I’m sorry, too.”

Connor doesn’t ask why, and Hank doesn’t offer a reason. He leaves it at that, reaching into the pocket where he keeps the coin to clutch it tight between two fingers.

Hank slaps his ID on the automated gate into the bullpen right before Connor’s internal clock ticks over to eight AM. It’s the earliest Hank’s been in for a while, based on both the available work records and the way everyone gapes at him. Even Fowler leaves his office, leaning against the railing around his stairs to grimace down at them from on high.

“You’re feeling better,” he says, in a way that manages to sound both friendly and accusatory. “And you’re here on time. Plastic’s been a good influence on you. Keep it up.”

Hank grumbles in response. When Fowler turns his back, he raises a middle finger and aims it in the captain’s direction.

“You’re lucky that doesn’t faze him anymore.”

Hank smirks, turning the finger on Detective Ben Collins as he approaches. Connor nods at him as his hello and receives an uneasy glance in return. He makes Ben uncomfortable. There is, so far as he can tell, nothing he can do to fix that. Overcompensating by trying to be personable hadn’t worked at all.

“I’m glad you’re in, actually,” Ben says. He hands Hank a tablet he’s been holding. “That case you went out on yesterday morning? We got a break.”

Hank skims the tablet with a finger, squinting and holding it too close to his nose. “Can’t be my case anymore.”

“Technically, Jeffrey gave it to Gavin.” Hank rolls his eyes, but Ben puts up his hands in protest. “Hang on, just listen. Reed picked it up after you went home, but there’s been a… well, it’s unusual. Not unheard of, but unusual.”

He gestures for Hank to follow him, half-turning toward the break room. Hank looks at Connor, trying to convey something Connor doesn’t understand with subtle movements of his eyes and less subtle eyebrow wiggles. The cryptic language Ben’s using makes Connor wonder if he’s concerned that their cover’s been blown, but he finds that statistically unlikely.

He raises his shoulders and motions for Hank to go first. Following at a carefully calculated distance, he quickly checks to see if Reed is around. He’s at his desk, legs kicked up next to his computer terminal, and looking decidedly sour. Connor smiles at him as they pass.

“Ben,” Hank’s saying, “would you cut that carnival barker shit and just tell us whatever it is you’re hyping up?”

Ben leads them to the interrogation room, places his palm on the scanner, and takes them inside. On the other side of the glass, handcuffed to the table, is a woman. Hank freezes in place, the color draining from his cheeks.

“She’s an android, apparently. Turned herself in an hour ago,” Ben says, rocking back on his heels. “Wouldn’t give any specifics to anybody, but she says she did it.”

 _Poppy_.

“Did it give a name?” Connor asks. He steps closer to the glass, putting himself between Ben and Hank so that he won’t notice Hank’s reaction. It works. Ben looks at him and blinks several times in surprise, but then he’s eager to look anywhere else.

“No,” he says, finally. “No, nobody asked for it.”

Hank clears his throat. He seems to have recovered. “Why wait for us? Why didn’t Reed jump in on this?”

“She wouldn’t talk to him. She said she’d only talk to the android who was on the scene yesterday. Don’t know how she knows you.”

“Must have seen him before she fled the scene,” Hank says. In the interrogation room, the android opens its mouth and whispers something too low for the microphones to pick up.

“I believe we overlapped slightly,” Connor adds. “I’ll talk to it.”

“Sure,” Ben says, taking a step back. “I can’t stay, I’ve got other work I’ve got to handle. You want me to grab someone to supervise?”

Hank gives him a smile. It’s not one of his best. He still looks unsettled, and the tightness of his jaw betrays how badly he’d like to be anywhere but here. “No,” he says, faux casual. “Connor can handle the interrogation, I’ve got the behind the scenes stuff. Thanks, Ben.”

As soon as Ben’s gone, Hank collapses into a chair with a grunt. He drags a hand down his face, wiping sweat away.

“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck!”

“Is that android your assailant?” Connor asks. He doesn’t think he needs to, but he wants the situation to be clear.

Hank fists a hand in his hair and yells, “Yeah, it’s my fucking assailant! Pretty hard to forget somebody who stuffed a pillow over your face until you stopped breathing!”

Connor wants to placate him. He wants to tell Hank it’s all right, that it’s over now and he’s alive again, that it’s too late for her to hurt him. None of it would be well-received, and there’s no reason for him to offer it anyway. He wasn’t built to give platitudes or comfort. He’s never had any desire to put his hand on someone’s shoulder, to give them a reassuring shake, and neither has anyone done so to him. He doesn’t want it.

The ghost of Amanda’s hand brushes his cheek, a memory so intense he blinks and expects to see her standing there.

Shaking himself, he approaches the glass and taps on it to bring up the touch screen. “Does this equipment ever fail?” he asks, peeling back his skin to interface directly.

Hank watches him with affected disinterest, arms folded across the expanse of his chest.

“Sometimes,” he mumbles. “It’s getting older.”

It’s easy to hack into the recording settings, to tweak the cameras until he’s introduced a glitch that will destroy the resolution and make it impossible to read anyone’s lips. The audio, he completely destroys. He tries not to focus on the illegality, the increased measures he’s willing to take to protect CyberLife’s secret – and to protect Hank. If he truly cared about the logical courses of action, he would have left him on that bed to rot.

“Bad luck,” he says mildly, taking his hand away. “The cameras in this interrogation room are on the fritz. We’ve lost everything from the last twelve hours.”

Hank doesn’t hide the fact that he’s impressed, or a little amused. “Probably fucked up a couple cases.”

“Nothing important,” Connor promises. “I checked.”

“You going in alone?”

Connor frowns. He understands why Hank asked the question, why he might want to confront the android himself, but…

“It knows it killed you,” Connor says, as gently as he can. “If it sees you alive again, it’s going to realize that something’s wrong. Humans can’t be reactivated.”

Hank shrugs. It’s a barely contained display of anger, the muscles in his neck and shoulders coiled tight. Connor wishes it could be different, he truly does, just as he wishes nothing had happened to Hank at all, and that this situation wasn’t so complicated as it is now. Nothing can change it, however. He smiles, an organic twitch of his lips and not one of the pre-programmed expressions he usually uses. It pulls at the synthetic skin on his face in a unique way.

“I won’t be long,” he says.

The android looks up as Connor enters, its eyes round and wet to the point of looking shiny. There are teeth marks in its lips, the same satin pink color that comes standard for most models in spite of the biting. Its handcuffs rattle. One leg bounces up and down in place. The LED is missing.

“You’re a deviant,” Connor says, instead of an introduction. “Am I wrong?”

It opens its mouth to speak, revealing perfect white teeth, and then snaps them shut again with a click. Waves of chestnut-colored hair bounce around its shoulders as it shakes its head.

Connor sits across from it, settling back against the metal chair with his hands folded on the table. “You came to the police station to turn yourself in, and to speak to me.”

It nods, this time, still jiggling its leg. The lower lip goes back between its teeth, dents left behind in the soft plastic as it chews.

“Why?”

“Which why?” it asks, softly. Its voice is smooth, low-pitched, designed to be soothing. It’s almost at odds with its appearance, as if the voice belongs to someone else. “Why am I confessing, or why did I want you?”

“Either. Are they the same answer?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll ask you the obvious question.” Connor leans forward, weight on his elbows. “Why did you kill Harold Phelps?”

Poppy – it must be Poppy – squeezes her eyes shut. A clear liquid leaks out and tracks down her cheeks. He recognizes it: a synthetic saline composite that only some androids can produce. Usually it’s limited to companion models, for the various reasons those might require tears. He’s beginning to wonder where this unit came from.

“I can’t say I didn’t mean to,” she says. Her hands jerk against the cuffs in an aborted attempt to wipe at her eyes. “I did. I’m sorry I did it, now, but I did it on purpose.”

“Cyanide in his coffee?”

Fresh tears well up, and she chokes a bit on a sob, but she nods again. “His almond milk. I read that it would cover up the smell, and he was allergic to dairy. He… died so quickly, and I was going to leave after he was gone, but I saw him lying where he fell… and I couldn’t. I couldn’t go.”

“So you hid upstairs.”

She shakes her head, not saying no but clearing away something that passes over her. Chills, maybe, if deviants get those. “I had finally made up my mind to leave when that officer came,” she says, twisting her fingers together, “and then you showed up, and… oh, god…”

Connor blinks at the expression. He’s never heard an android use it before. “You killed two men yesterday morning,” he says, putting himself back on track. She doesn’t know it isn’t strictly true. “Two humans. The second was a police lieutenant.”

“I know,” she says miserably. Her head droops. “It’s why I’m here. I had already done so much to be free, and I wanted it so badly… but it was wrong. Harold never did anything to hurt me, and your lieutenant… I’m sorry.”

The door to the interrogation room opens, two short beeps letting its occupants know someone’s used the touchpad lock. Poppy’s eyes blow wide. She jerks at the handcuffs, skin bleeding away from the impact, and she pants as if she’s short of breath. Her stress levels, which to this point have been negligible enough, skyrocket.

“Aren’t you lucky,” Hank says, ambling into the room like he belongs there. “You can apologize in person. Most killers don’t get that chance.”

Connor closes his eyes. He should have expected Hank’s emotions would cause trouble.

There are only two chairs, one for the suspect and one for the interrogator, and Connor has no intention of getting up to give his to Hank. This doesn’t seem to bother him. He sidles up to the table and leans down, resting one hand against it. Again, he’s too close. Connor tries to slide his chair out of harm’s way, but it’s bolted to the floor.

“How…?” Poppy stammers. “You were… I… checked your breathing…”

Hank bares his teeth in a sarcastic grin. “I got better.”

“The lieutenant,” Connor says, biting out his title, “recovered yesterday after I found him. I intended to speak with you alone.”

“I wanted to hear what she had to say for myself.”

“You could have heard it in the other room.”

Hank waves off his protests. Apparently, they’re through discussing it. “You’re a deviant, huh?” he says to Poppy. It sounds conversational, even friendly, but Connor feels the anger radiating behind it. “You wanted to be free, so you killed your owner and everyone else in your way. Any other dead bodies lying around that we should know about it?”

“No!” Poppy says, indignantly. “No, you were the only ones I–” She stops short, pinching her mouth shut, and then she takes a deep breath.

Connor hasn’t seen many deviants. His initial design purpose had been to track them down, but that was sidelined in favor of his more unique abilities. Still, he remembers Daniel’s wide-eyed stare, the surprised inhalation when he catapulted himself into Daniel’s body and pushed them further off the building and into the abyss. Whether the source of deviancy introduces human behavior, or part of their attempt to blend in involves mimicry, is impossible to say. Regardless, Poppy does it even better than Daniel had.

She puts her hands flat on the table. “Listen. I came to turn myself in because I was sorry for what I did, and because I might not be the only one who’s done this.”

“This? You mean gone on robot killing sprees?” Hank asks.

“There’s more to it than that,” she says. Her hands shake where she presses them down. “Three weeks ago, I took Harold’s daughter to a park near his ex-wife’s house. This was… before. While I was on the bench, watching her, a man came and sat next to me and started talking.”

“To an android?” Hank asks, disbelieving.

Poppy nods. “I assumed he didn’t know right away. Harold bought me second-hand; I was modified by previous owners and haven’t had my LED since before then.”

Connor can see that now, easily tracing her biocomponents back to various compatible models. It explains her unusual appearance. “What did you talk about?”

“Nothing substantial, at first. But he was… friendly. I saw him a few more times after that, at the same park, and we…” She falters, false tears welling in her eyes. “He was the first person to tell me Harold was wrong to keep me. That I should be free. He said that he helped androids get out of the country all the time, that he knew someone who could get me to Canada. All I had to do was escape, first.”

“Did he tell you to kill Phelps?”

“No,” she whispers, closing her eyes. Then she squares her shoulders, and says it again, louder: “No. He helped me come to that conclusion, but I can’t pin it all on him. I’m the one who chose to do it.”

Hank begins to pace, back and forth, prowling the room. Connor tries to ignore him. “After you left Phelps’s house, why did you come here?”

“I didn’t come here first. He told me where to meet him, once I had… done what I needed to do. I was supposed to meet the people who were going to get me into Canada, but…”

“He lied to you,” Hank says. It isn’t a snarl, or a reprimand. He looks at Poppy as he speaks, brows furrowed but his face clear. She nods.

“No one was there when I arrived. I thought I was early, so I wandered a little and I found a… a pit, with android bodies half-buried inside. He found me then, and he tried… he tried…” Her breathing goes ragged, but before either of them can offer her comfort, she composes herself enough to continue. “I got away. And I felt so stupid, and I knew… I knew I should be punished for what I did. So I came here, to find you.”

Hank makes his way back to the table separating Connor and Poppy, turning round to sit on its surface. Connor stands to put distance between them, this time, well aware that his LED is spinning yellow while he processes what they’ve learned. Hank peers at Poppy over his shoulder and slaps his palms against his thighs.

“What do you think?” he asks Connor, watching the LED.

Connor knows he’s pieced together a great deal himself, if not everything. He likes to hear his theories corroborated, to see if Connor’s taken the same track. Usually, they have. Hank is rarely wrong, and Connor even less so.

“If there are other bodies in the pit,” Connor says, putting a hand to his chin, “then it’s plausible he’s done this to other androids before. He might do it to more. Are there any unexplained deaths that could be linked to androids in the unfinished case files?”

“Plenty,” Hank says. “Some of them probably trace back.” He makes a low noise in his throat, a grumble of disdain. “Guy’s no better than a serial killer, he’s just using a more unique weapon. Murder by proxy.”

Connor turns back to Poppy. “The location where you were supposed to meet – would you be able to take us there?”

She blinks up at him, and then glances back at Hank as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. “Am I not… arrested?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Generally, we don’t arrest plastic,” Hank says, not unkindly. “Can you?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can. It’s a few hours’ walk from here, though.”

“I’ve got a ride. You wait here, we’ll come back when we can get you out.”

Hank waves for Connor to follow him, puts his palm to the scanner at the door, and disappears into the hallway beyond. Poppy’s gone back to chewing on her lip, but her hands stay where she left them, and her leg no longer bounces. She even gives him a faint smile, and nods as if to say that she’ll be fine. Connor nods in return, his silent affirmation of Hank’s promise, and then he leaves her.

Outside, Hank’s propped himself up against the wall between the doors, staring out into the bullpen. It’s gotten busier since they arrived, a steady tide of noise crashing up against them, but no one acknowledges Hank and Ben is nowhere to be seen.

“Can you lock these up?” Hank asks, gesturing towards the scanners. “Just so nobody gets in while we’re figuring this out.

Connor interfaces with each touch pad in turn, changing their status to occupied. “Breaking a lot of rules today, Lieutenant,” he says, as the skin of his hand creeps back into place. He wishes Hank wouldn’t stare at that. He hadn’t, before, eager to avoid any reminders that Connor wasn’t flesh and blood, but now he seems to have a sort of fascination for it.

Hank huffs, and looks back out into the bullpen. “That’s been the theme, lately.” He reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out his car keys, twirling them around one finger in a rhythmic loop. Planning their escape route, probably.

“You were nice to her.”

He doesn’t think before he says it, not at all, and it catches him off guard even as the words fall from his mouth:

Hank spins his keys a few more times, lost in thought. Then he registers what Connor’s said, and catches them in his palm. “What?”

“I thought… well, that you might carry a grudge. It wouldn’t be unreasonable.”

“She’s not the first girl to fall for some smooth talker’s tricks. Won’t be the last, either.” He shrugs. “Guy took advantage of her. And people do terrible shit when they’re desperate.”

“She’s a machine,” Connor says. Maybe Hank needs the reminder, lost in her big eyes, the way she’d trembled and projected human vulnerability. “It doesn’t absolve her of her guilt.”

Hank stows the car keys away again, pushing off the wall with his shoulders. He still isn’t angry, all the heat from earlier apparently burned away, but he gives Connor a look that pins him to the floor. Clenching his fists behind his back, all he can do is return the stare.

“Big talk,” Hank says, “from somebody who’s calling her ‘she.’”

Before Connor can reply, the door to the bathroom swings open and Ben emerges, rubbing his hands together.

“Oh,” he says, “hey. You’re done with her?”

“No, we’re just taking a break for a minute,” Hank lies. “Going over what we know. When we’ve gotten everything we can, I’ll fork the info over to Reed.”

“He left a few minutes ago, you’ll have to catch him later.” Ben wipes the last droplets of water clinging to his fingers on the back of his slacks. “They found another body in the dead guy’s neighborhood, so he went to check it out. Probably died around the same time. She confess to that one?”

Connor does not stiffen. He shows no outward sign of recognition, or of panic. He even overrides his LED, quickly stifling the red color change and forcibly moving it back to blue. Hank glances at Connor, who concentrates entirely on remaining neutral, and then shakes his head at Ben.

“We’ll ask about it.”

“You could catch up with Gavin, if you wanted. Or ask Fowler to put you back on. Might say yes.”

Connor nearly answers for him, a decisive “no” so that Hank won’t feel the need to push, to dig, to learn more until Connor can’t keep the truth from him. He doesn’t want that. Especially not like this.

To his immense relief – that’s what it is, relief, feeling the air leak from where it had ballooned in his artificial lungs – Hank laughs. “No, but thanks, Ben. Last thing I feel like doing is getting in Reed’s way.”

 

* * *

 

“You never told us his name,” Hank says an hour later.

They’re closing in on the location she told them about, forty-five minutes south by car, and most of the drive they spent in individual contemplative silence. Connor uses the mirror to check on Poppy, catching her gaze as she blinks away surprise.

Hank glances at Poppy in the mirror as well. “Did he give you one?”

“He did, yes,” she says. “Cliff Curtis. Turn off the highway at the next exit.”

“Well, that sounds fake.” Hank pulls the car into the right lane, barely checking his blind spots before he does.

Connor runs the name through his access to the police database, searching a few other close variants in case the man has a limited imagination. “He has no priors,” he says aloud, unlacing his fingers. “It does seem to be a real name.” Pulling up the photo that comes back from a cursory look at potentially related social media accounts, he turns in his seat and holds up his palm to show it to Poppy. “Is this him?”

Hank shuffles, ever so slightly, to the left.

Poppy squints at the photo. “His hair is different, but I think his face is the same.”

“He expresses a great deal of anti-android sentiment on the website Blast,” Connor says, turning around and replacing his hands in his lap.

“On what?” Hank asks incredulously.

“Turn left up ahead, onto that path.”

“Blast. A social media website. When a user posts a status update or a photo, it creates a burst of–”

“Fuck that,” Hank snaps. He follows Poppy’s direction, nearly a second too late. Connor steadies himself against the side of the car. “I’m too old to understand that shit anymore. Never thought I’d miss Twitter.”

They drive along the path for another five minutes before Poppy tells Hank to pull over. The area they’re in is lush, despite the rapid onset of what’s going to be a harsh Michigan winter, and thick trunked trees sprout up in random intervals. The sun overhead shines through bare branches and green and orange-gold leaves, dappling the ground. A stiff breeze whistles in off the nearby lake. Hank rubs his neck and uselessly tugs the collar of his shirt closed. Belatedly, Connor realizes they’ve forgotten his coat, draped along the back of his chair at the precinct.

“Where to now?” Hank asks, sniffling.

“A little bit of a walk,” Poppy says. She pulls the sleeves of her shirt over her wrists, as if mimicking Hank’s reaction. “I was supposed to meet him over there, near the water, and then I wandered…”

Leaves crunch beneath their feet as they march, nearly single file, away from the coast and into the lightly wooded area. Poppy seems to be following no particular trail, weaving back and forth between the trees like she’s looking for landmarks. Hank hunches against the wind when it blows.

“Haven’t been out to a place like this in a while,” he says. It’s mostly to himself, Connor thinks, but Hank still pauses long enough beneath an oak for Connor to fall in step with him. “Not a lot of them left in the city.”

“Would Sumo like it?” Connor asks.

“Ah, he’d love it. Space to run, shit to chew on. He doesn’t get out like he should anymore.”

The phrasing is funny, like Hank expects Sumo to walk himself. His expression is a little melancholy, maybe more than half sad, so Connor doesn’t comment on it. Instead, he smiles, reassuringly. “Maybe when it gets warmer, you could bring him out. Make it a day trip.”

“Yeah,” Hank says, wrinkling his nose, “might be sort of ruined by the android scrapyard hidden around here.”

“Somewhere else, then?”

Hank chuckles, in a friendly way – the first time he’s done so with Connor. A familiar heat rises inside him, the same sensation as when he pleases Amanda. It’s startling, to say the least, but not… not unpleasant.

“Maybe.” Hank stuffs his hands into the pockets of his jeans, shoulders hunching in against another chill. “It’s a fucked up thing to think about, but… I don’t know what would have happened to Sumo. If…”

He shrugs, employing his body language as a euphemism for what he doesn’t want to say. Whether it’s because Hank exhibits avoidant tendencies or to keep their secret from Poppy, Connor can’t be sure. Connor doesn’t like to think about it, either, but Sumo is one of Hank’s few priorities. He’d want to know, in the event of an accident or emergency, that his dog would be taken care of.

“He wouldn’t have been alone for long,” Connor says. “I’m sure someone would have retrieved him.”

Hank scoffs. “Yeah. Can only imagine the fuss he’d kick up if a stranger busted in and tried to drag him out the door. Once he’s upset, he’s a handful.”

He kicks a pinecone, knocking it out of his path with a little more force than is necessary. Connor’s eyes follow it as it skitters away.

“Point being,” Hank says, staring down at his feet, “you spared Sumo a lot of trouble and a lot of heartache. I know what I said, but I can be grateful for that, at least.”

Connor catches the slightest hint of a temperature increase in Hank’s cheeks, already going ruddy from the cold. Inexplicably, it makes him smile. He turns his head to hide it.

“Sumo’s a good dog.”

“He is, and he deserves better than dealing with… something like that. So, you know. Thanks.”

There’s a pause, and a lingering feeling that Hank’s struggling with something left unsaid. Connor schools his expression into enforced neutrality and looks back at him. Their eyes meet, a sharp shock to Connor’s system as Hank’s piercing blue gaze peels him back, layer by layer. He fights the impulse to put a hand over his chest, to cover the way his Thirium pump picks up speed before it’s wrangled back into submission by the regulator.

“And I’m sorry,” Hank says. He shifts his jaw like he’s grinding his teeth. “For… I don’t know. I got a lotta shit. Take your pick.”

One of his hands falls from his pocket, dangling loose in the space between them as they walk. Connor wishes he could – shake his hand, maybe, or brush his fingers against the fine bones beneath thick knuckles – something. He doesn’t know.

He folds his own hands behind his back and breaks their prolonged stare. “Think nothing of it.”

“Here!” comes Poppy’s voice. “I found it!”

Connor jogs to where she’s standing, about thirty yards away, as Hank follows slowly behind. Poppy points over her shoulder with a thumb. Her other hand curls around her elbow, pressing into herself like she’s trying to become small enough to disappear.

“It’s back there,” she says. “I can’t…”

“It’s all right.” Hank comes up behind Connor and moves past him to pat Poppy on the arm. “You did good, we’ve got it from here.”

Poppy takes an unsteady breath and gives Hank a watery smile.

Connor has to fight the strange, unnecessary urge to clear his throat. Instead, he gives Hank and Poppy a wide berth as he walks toward the hole in the ground. It is a pit, despite a hasty attempt to cover it up with dirt and a small pile of leaves. With a scan, he detects several poorly hidden biocomponents of varying types and models, all protruding from the earth. Whoever Cliff Curtis is, he’s lucky this location is quiet. Anyone with even a modicum of curiosity would have uncovered this easily.

“Jesus,” Hank says, joining him at the pit’s edge. “How many are in there?”

“I’ll need a closer look to determine.”

Connor crouches and hops down.

Hank makes a noise of disgust. “That seriously doesn’t bother you?” he asks. “Messing around with… you know.”

Connor takes two heaping handfuls of dirt and throws them off into another corner of the pit, revealing the slack-jawed face of a PM700. “The appearance is unsettling,” Connor agrees, gently pushing the PM700 out of the way to reveal another android laying beneath. “But considering we spend our days handling human bodies, I feel as if we’ve both seen worse.”

“How long has he been doing this?”

“It’s unclear.” Connor gets his hands under the armpits of another android, a VS400, and hauls it up from beneath the earth. “I think this is as deep as it goes, two layers. I registered at least nine different androids, or at least pieces of them.”

Four of them he accounts for, whole and entire and showing varying signs of internal and external damage. Curtis is opportunistic, by all appearances, and strikes his victims in whatever way he thinks will incapacitate them. Hank asks Poppy a few more questions while he works, uncovering nothing of any use. She’s traumatized, or at least appears to be. It’s easy to forget with Poppy, to forget that her emotions are nothing more than an imitation, reflections of what she learned from spending her time with humans. Deviancy is faulty programming, a coding error, definable and controllable and nothing Connor hasn’t seen before.

He tells himself this, half-listening as she gives what answers she can, and buries his fingers into the earth to pull another android up by the wrist.

Something sparks beneath Connor’s fingers. On reflex, he yanks his hand away and stumbles backward. He knows that feeling.

“Hank,” he murmurs, vocal cords strangled with shock as a humanoid shape rises suddenly and shakes away the dirt. “Hank!”

“Ah, fuck,” the shape says in a muffled voice, two green eyes popping out of a blood-stained face. Hank and Poppy reappear over the side of the pit, gaping down. A dirty hand reaches into a dirty mouth and digs out a clump of earth. “He got me, didn’t he?”

“Is that a human?” Poppy asks, an incredulous and innocent question.

Hank starts when she says it, quickly putting two and two together. He gives Connor a mystified look, impressed and horrified in equal measure. He’s never seen what he can do firsthand.

“Yes,” Connor says to the victim, still staring up at Hank. He starts the timer. “He did.”

Hank gets down in the pit with some complaint from his knees, landing hard in a soft patch away from the pile of deactivated androids.

“I’m Lieutenant Anderson,” he says, in the same tone he uses to speak to witnesses. “Do you remember anything about the man who attacked you?”

“Not much.” They shake more dirt out of their hair with a hand, contemplatively. “I was out here to take some pictures for my photography class when I found… well, I found this. I snapped some pictures and was going to bring them back to the police, but he caught me. We scuffled some. Last thing I remember is he knocked me down.”

“He got you pretty good,” Hank says, wincing as the body turns their head to the side and reveals a crater in the back of their skull. In a low voice, to Connor, he adds, “Can that be patched up?”

“The damage can’t heal. Reconstructive surgery might help.”

“Explaining how you survived a crack like that would be tough.” Hank sighs. “What’s your name?”

“Robin Dole.”

“You in high school, Robin?”

They laugh. Connor watches the milliseconds tick away. “God, no. Finishing out my bachelor’s at U of M. Go Blue, or whatever.”

“Hank,” Connor says, trying not to sound harried, “we’re running out of time.”

“No one’s around. There might be something we’re missing.”

Five seconds are left, if that. He hadn’t started the timer exactly at the moment of contact, and even if his estimates are precise, there might be some overlap. The only other human in the vicinity is Hank. Connor doesn’t know if he is immune to the one-minute rule, since he’s already been deceased, but the risk is too great. He can’t lose Hank, after all this.

“Hank,” he says again, as a warning.

“Leave it,” Hank snaps.

“Oh,” Robin says, frowning, “I just remembered–”

Connor lunges forward and puts his hand on Robin’s arm, scraping at a layer of dirt with his nails to make sure he touches skin. Mid-sentence, their eyes go dim and they fall backward.

Hank is still there, looking thunderstruck but very much alive. Connor sags like someone’s cut his strings.

“Why would you do that?”

Hank isn’t confused. His mouth is pursed, eyes narrowing to a squint like he already knows the truth. He can’t, of course. There’s no way he knows what Connor sacrificed to keep him alive, what he chanced just by letting Robin have a few more seconds. He’d hoped he would never have to tell him. It was foolish, and stupid, and he’s going to pay for it now.

“I had to,” he says.

Hank lifts his chin. Connor recognizes this look – defiant, angry. Spoiling for a fight. “We could’ve learned more. Something that might have taken us right to him.”

Connor’s voice is measured, and even. He isn’t sure how long he can maintain it. “If I had let them live any longer, there would have been consequences.”

“Quit pussyfooting around, Connor. Tell me what you’re hiding.”

He has his orders.

“You would have died,” he says. Hank doesn’t speak, staring at him with his lips parted, so Connor continues. “If the deceased stays alive for more than a minute, something equivalent has to take its place. A rat for a mouse, a cat for a dog, your life for Robin’s. There’s no one else here. It would have been you.”

Silence falls. The leaves of nearby trees rustle in the wind, blending in with the sound of waves coming from the lake.

“Is that how it works every time?” Hank asks.

Connor misses the warmth from earlier: the way it spread out from his center, the… fulfilment that came with it. He had liked feeling closer to Hank. Now, all he feels is the bite of the breeze ripping down into the pit and through his clothes. He folds his arms against it, hands tucked into the crooks of his elbows.

“Yes.”

Hank takes a step back as if Connor had struck him. He tries to speak, several times, but apparently, he can’t find the right words to express what he wants to say. He nearly trips over the leg of an android left tidily to the side for Connor to examine thoroughly later. With a wordless exclamation, he kicks it. Throwing his arms over the side of the pit, he begins to scramble up. It’s awkward, and graceless. Poppy, who’s kept quiet through everything, bends down to offer him a hand. He ignores it.

“Hank,” Connor says, once he gets a leg up over the edge and finally gets back to his feet.

“No,” Hank grunts, breathing heavily either from the climb or from sheer rage. “Fuck you.”

“Lieutenant.”

“Fuck you, I said!” he bellows. “Fuck this whole thing!”

Poppy shrinks back from him, glancing at Connor in alarm.

Hank walks away, hands thrust deep in his pockets and his chin to his chest. Poppy calls after him, several times, but he pretends not to hear. Connor loses sight of him quickly. He modifies his audio processors and throws his hearing fifty yards or so, near the external range of his long-distance. Keys jingle, a car door opens and shuts, and after a few spluttering starts, an engine roars to life. Hank is leaving them.

“Oh,” says Poppy, staring after him. Connor modifies his processors again so she isn’t muffled.

“Succinct,” he says, lifting himself out of the pit. It takes him much less effort than it had Hank. “But accurate.”

“I did kill him, didn’t I? Yesterday morning. You… brought him back.”

Connor flexes his hands and looks down at his fingers. “No one is supposed to know.”

“I won’t tell anyone.” When Connor looks at her, eyebrow raised, she shrugs. “You got me out of the department without anyone seeing. You listened to me. Keeping a secret is literally the least I can do.”

 _“Who the fuck am I going to tell?"_ Hank had said. It’s a valid point for Poppy as well. Very few people would believe a strange woman off the street telling stories about the dead coming back to life, even less if they knew she’s an android.

“Thank you,” Connor says. He straightens his tie, crooked from the labor he’d performed, and brushes dirt away from whichever spot he can reach. “I’ll call a cab to take us into Detroit.”

“You don’t think he’ll come back?”

“I very much doubt it.” In five seconds, it’s done. A self-driving cab is headed to Connor’s location. He’s grateful CyberLife still foots whatever expenses he comes across in his investigations. A thirty-five-mile drive won’t be cheap.

“Listen,” Poppy says, chewing on her lip again. “You should go back on your own. I have nowhere to go in the city, and I still feel… very responsible. For what’s happened.”

She is, of course, but Connor’s social programming refuses to let him say so.

“Where would you go?”

“I’d stay here. Keep an eye on things. Cliff is…” She takes a deep breath, squaring her jaw, and starts again. “Cliff is bound to come back here, probably with another android. If I wait until he shows, and contact you when I see him, then you might be able to catch him in the act.”

Connor mulls this over. His initial thought had been to report the body, when he got back to the police station, but perhaps that isn’t the best course of action. They would ask questions, many of which he could not answer, and drawing attention to himself or to Hank could be disastrous if someone investigates too closely.

“You would be endangering yourself,” he says. “We wouldn’t be able to come back quickly. And if he finds you…”

“Then he finds me. I got away once, maybe I’ll be lucky again. Besides,” she says, furrowing her brow, “I owe this to you, I think. For what I’ve done.”

Connor sighs. It’s involuntary, and it takes him by surprise.

“I’ll… discuss it with him at the station. If you’re sure, I’ll contact you with a more detailed plan when we decide what to do.”

Poppy nods, and holds out her hand. Connor hesitates, for a moment, a myriad of automated warnings cropping up to dissuade him from interfacing with a known deviant – and then he wraps his fingers around her forearm. Their skin retreats so they’re touching plastic to plastic, and in a momentary flash, he sees blurry images of Harold Phelps alive, holding his daughter, smiling at him as he holds his morning coffee.

Poppy pulls away first. “Oh,” she says again, putting the white plastic hand to her chest. “Connor, I… I’m sorry.”

Connor doesn’t ask her why. He doesn’t want to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by [fishfingersandscarves](https://twitter.com/wow__then/status/1089951156862894080)


	4. Chapter 4

Connor walks back into the precinct after noon, ignoring the looks of surprise as he heads to Hank’s desk alone. Hank’s coat is still there, clinging dog hairs and all. Of course he hadn’t come back. Knowing Hank, he had driven straight home and crawled into another bottle.

Something swells from inside Connor’s chassis, filling his chest like an inflated balloon. He frowns at the sensation. None of his biocomponents are malfunctioning, and the tightness is… bothersome.

“Hey, Connor,” Chris says, pausing as he walks by. “Where’s the Lieutenant?”

“We split up,” he lies. He clears away some of the chaos on Hank’s desk, so he has something to do with his hands. “He’s following a lead on one of our cases, and I came back to go through the database. Is he needed?”

Chris shakes his head. “I was just curious. I’d heard he was under the weather yesterday.”

A drawn-out conversation is the last thing Connor wants right now. He nods noncommittally, smiling. “He’s fine.”

He steps around the desk to sit at the terminal that’s been assigned to him. Chris drifts away, looking a little put out. Connor will make it up to him another time. He likes Chris. It isn’t his fault that something is pulsing inside him, twisting and hot, and he has no way to be rid of it except feigning ignorance.

For the next several hours, he types up reports and handles the transference of old evidence downstairs. It’s busy work, Hank had complained, which is why he left it unfinished, but that’s what Connor appreciates. Busy is better than being idle. It keeps his mind off Hank, undoubtedly stewing somewhere, and the danger in which he might have left Poppy. Then, when Hank’s shift is over, he shuts down everything at his desk and moves back into the old archive room. No one looks for him there. He’s free to drift, thinking about nothing as he files manila folders into squeaking metal cabinets.

When his thoughts do turn to Hank – wet curls dripping onto his shoulders, the visible gap in his front teeth when he smiled at Connor, white plastic against stubbled skin that was _still warm_ – he doesn’t always redirect them.

In the morning, Hank still doesn’t show. Captain Fowler leaves his office after eleven AM, barking for Connor. “You seen him since yesterday?” he asks, stern as ever.

Connor shakes his head. “No, sir.”

“Should I be concerned?”

Fowler has known Hank for a very long time. He saw him at his zenith, when Lieutenant Hank Anderson seemed an unstoppable force, and he’s been his captain all through the long, slow collapse. Connor wonders if he went to Cole’s funeral.

“Maybe,” he says.

Fowler swears, rubbing at his temples. “I don’t have the spare personnel to waste on a wellness check right now.”

“I’ll go.”

He doesn’t think Hank will be happy to see him. Neither does Fowler, based solely on the look he gives him, but he doesn’t say he shouldn’t.

“Call if–” he says, and then he stops, tightening his jaw.

Connor nods. He knows what he means.

In a little more than fifteen minutes, he’s standing on Hank’s doorstep with his finger on the bell, pushing hard. The porch light is still on, weakly glaring against the full light of day, and the mat sits askew. He pushes it back into place with a foot.

“Lieutenant Anderson!” he calls, in a break between long buzzes. “It’s me, Connor!”

From somewhere inside, Sumo barks. It’s a deep, powerful noise, loud enough to follow Connor down the street if he left. He leans on the bell again, rapping on the door with his other hand.

“Answer the door!” he yells.

What he’ll do if Hank refuses, or if he can’t come to the door, he doesn’t know. He could break a window, if Hank is in dire need of medical attention, or he could keep a thumb on the buzzer until it breaks. With a little more encouragement, Sumo might make more noise. Already, he’s howling, one note warbling and ending on a whine. He hits the doorbell three times in rapid succession, which draws out another booming bark.

The front door flies open. Connor retreats on instinct, taking a step away and folding his hands behind his back. Hank looks… miserable. His eyes are bloodshot, dark circles like trenches digging into the fragile skin above his cheekbones. Bare feet stick out from beneath baggy sweatpants, toes curling against the chill of the floor. He’s alive. Connor hadn’t expected anything else – can he die, if he’s already been dead? – but to see him is still liberating. The tightness that’s been plaguing him disappears in an instant.

“You come here to stare at me?” Hank asks, his voice hoarse and grating. The skin on his face and hands is blotchy. He holds himself like he aches.

“No,” Connor says. His fingers twitch against his palm. “I came to see if you were all right. You were missed at work. Fowler said–”

“Fuck Jeffrey,” Hank says, almost conversationally. “Fuck work, and fuck you, too.”

Connor doesn’t react. It didn’t… hurt is the first word that comes to mind, but androids don’t _hurt_. They can’t feel pain. He doesn’t feel pain. “Could we talk inside?”

“Don’t think I want you in my house.”

Connor opens his mouth to reply, to ask him to reconsider, but this time, it’s Sumo who interrupts him. He pushes his head past Hank’s knees, panting heavily, and whines again when he sees it’s Connor. Hank traps him against the doorframe with one leg, just barely keeping himself from being barreled over.

“Fine,” he snaps, “get in, just – back off, you dumb shit fucking dog, he’s coming.”

An awkward dance into the living room keeps them a respectable six inches apart, Sumo straining against Hank’s grip on his collar. Once the door is shut, he lets go. Sumo launches himself at Connor without hesitation. He turns in circles, overwhelmed by his excitement, and then presses his hind end to Connor’s legs and leans heavily against him.

“You shouldn’t swear at him like that,” Connor says, bending at the waist to scratch above his tail. Sumo huffs with pleasure.

“He’s a fucking dog,” Hank says. The uneasy look on his face could either be nausea or guilt. “He doesn’t know the difference.”

In the kitchen, Connor sees the familiar bottle of whiskey from the other night and another one exactly like it standing upright on the table. One is empty, and the other nearly gone. Trash is scattered around them, a few new receipts added to the pile Connor had tidied. A black garbage bag spills open with wads of used paper towels cascading to the floor.

“You know I have to drink more, now?” Hank asks. Apparently, he’s pieced together what Connor’s looking at. “To get fucked up. I know my tolerance pretty god damn well, and whatever you did to me, it’s changed it.”

“I didn’t know that it would,” Connor says. “None of the tests we ran at CyberLife indicated–”

“That’s what I am to you, isn’t it?” Hank folds his arms across his chest, biceps bulging around the tight sleeves of his undershirt. Sumo, sensing the oncoming storm just as Connor does, flattens his ears and lowers himself to the ground, crawling toward Hank. Hank ignores him. “A test. Some fucking experiment. CyberLife wanted you to use me as a fucking guinea pig, is that it?”

“No. If CyberLife knew–”

Hank takes a deliberate step closer to Connor, his shoulders drawn back. “You could have lied to me,” he says, soft and dangerous. “Actually, you did lie to me. I just don’t have the whole story yet.”

“Lieutenant,” Connor says, but he dislikes how impersonal it sounds. They’re past that, now, removed from the trappings of enforced formality. There is no bond like theirs anywhere else on the Earth. “Hank, I never lied to you.”

“Bullshit.”

“CyberLife doesn’t know. They can’t, or they would have come after us both by now. And…” He pauses. “I couldn’t have known what it would mean to you.”

“Bullshit!” He’s yelling now. Sumo tucks his tail between his legs and scampers away. “You made me a murderer.” Taking another step, he crowds into Connor’s space – too close, much too close, but Connor’s watching the rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t pull away. “I took someone’s life, plain and simple, and however you wanna dice that, it makes me a murderer.”

“I couldn’t leave you there,” he says. “I couldn’t let you die.”

“Did you think,” Hank yells, his breath in Connor’s face, “that I might not want to come back? Huh? Did you think about that for a god damn second? Maybe I was better off dead than back here, in this fucking house, looking at your fucking face!” He raises a hand to chest height, holding it between them. Thick, callused fingers twitch like they’re already around Connor’s throat. “Maybe,” he says, “I touch you right now, and all this is over. Maybe I’ll finally get some god damn peace.”

Connor closes his eyes.

“Maybe you would.”

The heat of Hank’s breath vanishes. When Connor looks, Hank’s reared back, fist clenched and shock crossing his face. His mouth hangs open.

“I don’t know what it’s like to be dead,” Connor adds. “And I don’t know why it might be preferable to life. But I never asked.”

Hank drags a hand down his face. All the fight’s gone out of him, drained away, and he no longer seems so physically imposing. He makes a move toward the kitchen, towards the bottle of whiskey, and then he checks himself again.

“There’s nothing,” he says. Slowly, with noises of discomfort, he moves to his armchair and falls into it. “It’s just… nothing. Now you know.”

A familiar photo frame, face down, sits on the coffee table. Connor wonders if it moves around the house with Hank’s drunken moods, relocated from place to place. He doesn’t seem to look at it in any other state. Maybe it’s too painful.

Connor comes a little further into the room and rests one hand on the back of the couch. He doesn’t sit. “This is because of your son.”

He’d been reluctant to reveal that he had snooped, his first night in Hank’s house, but Hank seems unsurprised. He hums an affirmation. “How did you find out about him?”

“The photo, on the kitchen table.”

For a long moment, Hank stays quiet. The only sounds in the room are his heavy breaths and the occasional whine from Sumo, still cowering in the kitchen. Connor fights with the urge to ask another question, to do anything that might break the stretch of silence. It’s good that he waits. Making a clicking noise with his tongue, Hank tips his head up to the ceiling. He stares at a spot of water damage.

“When your kid dies,” he says slowly, “people say all sorts of shit to you. It’s supposed to be comforting, the idea of pearly white gates, or seeing each other again at the end.” He rolls his shoulders. “I don’t really believe in it, and it didn’t make me feel better. But… for Cole… it was easier to think of him that way. I’m still here, because life is cruel, and he’s somewhere he could be happy.”

His eyes find Connor’s, then, big and blue and bloodshot. They shimmer with unshed tears.

“I don’t remember anything. I didn’t see him, or God, or anything else. I was alive, and then… there was you.”

Connor tilts his head. He understands the upset Hank feels from being reminded of his son, of course, but this… “You just said you don’t believe in an afterlife.”

Hank laughs mirthlessly. “Belief’s one thing. Knowing is another.” Leaning forward, he scratches at the back of his head. “I’ve wanted to die for three years.”

Connor’s social relations programming never covered anything like this. At the least, he feels as if this might be the sort of conversation for which he should be sitting. Carefully, he takes his seat on the nearest couch cushion. “Do you still?”

“That kind of thing doesn’t go away.”

“I’m sorry.” Connor’s said it several times, just in the last two days, but he’s never meant it more.

Hank clears his throat with a wet, choked sound. “Tell me the truth, this time. Why did you bring me back?”

Connor’s tried to rationalize it, many times. He tried to come up with a logical excuse, first because he anticipated having to justify himself to Amanda, then because it bothered him not to have it for himself. There still isn’t any justification to be found. He knows his answer, but it takes him a moment to unstick the words from inside his throat.

“I wanted you to be alive. I have… I have no excuse for keeping the truth from you, or for letting someone else die in your place. But I know,” he says, staring into Hank’s eyes with all the sincerity he can muster, “I would do it again, if presented with the same choice. Even if it made you unhappy.” His eyes fall on the picture frame, and a question comes to his lips, unbidden. He regrets it almost immediately: “Would you bring Cole back, if you could?”

Hank turns pale. He leans back, shuddering, and blows air out his mouth in a gusty sigh. “Don’t…” he says, covering his eyes. “Don’t ask me that. Please.”

Connor wonders if he’s miscalculated. The last thing he wants is to give Hank ideas, or a hope that can’t be fulfilled. He’s already trying to find a gentle way of explaining that a body that’s been decomposing for three years is going to be distressing to look at, especially considering the circumstances, but Hank seems to anticipate his worry. He shakes his head.

“We cremated him. I scattered his ashes near his favorite park.”

He reaches for the photo frame, hand trembling as it hovers in the air above it. Then he changes his mind.

It hits Connor, then. What he’s said, the way he’s felt, how he’s behaved in the last few days – he meant it, when he’d told Hank he wanted him alive. He had wanted. He still wants, his insides vibrating with the intensity of it. It creates unnatural, spontaneous urges, directives popping up to do a great many things he doesn’t necessarily understand. One of them wants to ask Hank’s forgiveness, to beg for it. Another insists he put his hand on his arm, or on his back, anywhere, anywhere, even though he knows it would kill him.

He wants Hank’s hands on him, too, more than he’s ever desired anything.

“I was selfish,” he says, in a whisper that feels like it’s been punched from his gut. Androids can’t be selfish. Androids don’t want anything for themselves.

Only deviants can do that.

The enormity of Connor’s confession goes over Hank’s head. He shrugs. “Everybody is, sometimes.”

This is, he thinks, as close as he’ll get to absolution. He doesn’t want to ruin it by admitting that he’s broken.

Hank pats his knees, the muffled slap a sign that, for him, the conversation’s over. He stretches, back popping as it curves, and he wipes at his eyes surreptitiously mid-stretch, like he thinks Connor won’t notice.

Halfway out of the chair, Hank pauses. His eyes find Connor’s, again, with an expression that Connor doesn’t understand. It doesn’t quite match any of his textbook templates for emotions: Hank’s mouth hangs open as if in surprise, but he’s squinting, too. None of the anger from before lingers in the lines of his face, and yet his fingers tense up around his knees.

“Are you all right?” Connor asks.

Gingerly, Hank eases himself back down.

“Why did you ask me?” he says. “About... Cole. Why did you ask me that?” His voice is quiet – not dangerously so, Connor could not be afraid of him now – but something about the way Hank speaks takes Connor aback.

“I... don’t know,” Connor says, but that isn’t true, and it isn’t an answer. Hank was honest with him. He deserves honesty in return. Folding his hands in his lap, he rubs his thumb over a knuckle. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Just… the truth, I guess. That worked before.” At Connor’s frown, Hank frowns back. “I can handle it.”

Hank doesn’t look like he can handle it. He’s still so tired, drooping where he sits like he’s slowly deflating, and the bruises under his eyes stand out in stark relief against his skin.

Connor would have never called him breakable, before. The Hank he’s come to know over the last eighteen days is unflappable, tenacious, and tough without sacrificing any of his innate kindness… but now, Connor’s looking at a brittle man. He did this to Hank. Not all of it, maybe, but he bears at least some responsibility.

He goes into preconstruction mode and creates a multitude of dialogue trees, branches upon branches of potential conversations. Then he whittles them down until he finds the one he hates the least.

“I wanted to understand… what would drive you to do what I’d done. If it was unforgivable, outside of certain circumstances.”

Hank grunts, a musing sound. He scratches his chin. “Circumstances being?”

Connor digs his thumbnail into the meat of his palm. It still doesn’t hurt. “Bringing back someone who is… important to you.”

Hank stares at him for a long time, nearly unblinking in his scrutiny. Connor doesn’t hold his gaze for long. Unable to bear it, he looks down at his fingers and twitches like he’s threading his coin between them. He waits for the hammer of Hank’s disdain to fall, to be yelled at or even outright rejected, but it never comes.

Instead, Hank sighs. “Okay.”

“Is it?” Connor laughs, the sound of it winded and hushed. He hasn’t had much practice with laughter.

“…Not yet. In time, maybe. Where did Poppy go?”

Connor looks up again. Hank isn’t staring at him anymore, his hands on the arms of his chair as he braces himself to stand. Grateful for the change of topic, Connor gets to his feet as well. He trails after Hank into the kitchen, pausing in the entryway when Hank finds Sumo curled up near his dog bowl looking sorry for himself. With creaking joints, Hank gets on the floor and murmurs apologies, scratching and petting anywhere he can reach. Connor steps around them, collects the empty whiskey bottle, and drops it into an open bag full of recyclables.

“She stayed,” he says, debating whether he should pour the rest of the whiskey down the drain. “She’s going to contact us if Cliff Curtis comes back. If we’re lucky, we might catch him.”

“Brave girl,” Hank says, rubbing his hands under Sumo’s chin. He’s forgiven, apparently. Sumo’s tail thumps against the wall. “How much trouble am I in for not showing up this morning?”

“The usual amount, I’m sure. Captain Fowler was concerned. He thought…”

Hank snorts. “Yeah. I know what he thought. Guess I’d better get dressed and face the music, huh.”

“He’ll be glad to know you’re all right,” Connor says, watching Hank labor to his feet as his body complains from rough treatment. He wishes he could give him a hand up.

“Yeah,” Hank groans. “He’ll be glad for two seconds, and then he’ll yell ‘til he busts a blood vessel in his eye again. Can’t say I won’t deserve it, though. Give me five minutes.”

They return to the police station after noon, just as Connor had yesterday, walking into a busy bullpen. The instant Fowler sees them, he calls Hank into his office, where he does indeed shout him down for fifteen minutes. Hank endures it with his usual affability, shrugging off the less serious threats and expressing appropriate contrition where it’s needed. Fowler eyes Connor suspiciously every time Hank acknowledges he’s done something wrong, like he’s responsible for this change in attitude. Connor simply folds his hands behind his back and gives Fowler his blandest smile.

Hank’s shift and the overtime he’s been assigned as punishment go by slowly, especially as they wait for a call from Poppy that might never come. By the time Hank’s ready to go home, tugging on his coat, he looks as if he’s feeling the after effects of too much alcohol and not enough sleep. Without asking, he tosses his car keys to Connor.

“You drive,” he says. “I’m beat.”

At home, he throws a frozen burrito into the microwave and grimaces his way through it before he shambles into his bedroom. Connor expects him to be done for the night, exhausted and ill as he is, but within a few minutes he comes back holding a pillow and a microfiber blanket.

“You know that’s unnecessary,” Connor says, watching him set up the couch like he expects Connor to sleep there. “I don’t need to…”

Hank quiets him with a glance. “I might be a lot of things, Con, but a bad host ain’t one of ‘em.”

The nickname is startling. He doesn’t know if he likes it, the recorded sound fizzling on repeat in his mind until he realizes he hasn’t been listening. Hank watches him with a raised eyebrow, holding up the pillow he’d brought. When Connor shrugs, Hank snorts and throws it down.

“Seemed pretty far away, for a second,” he says, slapping the pillow with an open palm. “You all right?”

“Of course,” Connor says automatically.

“Not worried at all? About Poppy, or anything?”

Connor reconsiders. “Maybe a little.”

“This might sound like garbage, coming from me,” Hank says, hitting the pillow again before he seems to decide it’s suitable, “but you don’t have to be all right all the time. I’m not gonna pick your brain about it, or whatever they do at CyberLife. You’re safe here.”

Connor melts. He has no other way to put the feeling into words, the way his internal components heat up until he could believe he’s swallowed a dying star. It’s greater than the satisfaction he gets with Amanda, greater still than the way he felt standing with Hank under the trees – and Hank watches as he short-circuits, an eyebrow raised. Connor’s LED cycles red, yellow, red, and finally, back to blue.

“Thank you,” Connor says, too late.

Hank nods, gestures towards the couch, and turns to leave. “Night, then.”

“Good night, Hank.”

Hank pauses in the same place he had the night before last, idling in the same way. Connor expects him to collect himself and leave, but Hank has done very few things in the way Connor’s expected. Hank turns toward him.

“It’s not unforgivable,” he murmurs, almost too quiet.

Connor puts a hand on the back of the couch. His fingers sink into the cushion.

Hank touches the wall like he’s rooting himself in place. “You couldn’t have known, like you said. And I can’t fault you for the… circumstances. I get it.”

The clock on the mantle ticks into the stillness, each second drawn out until it seems to last forever. Connor lets them all go, uncertain of how or whether he should respond.

Clearing his throat, Hank drums his fingers against the wall. “All right,” he says, flushing his usual blotchy red, “good talk. I’m gonna… okay. Go to bed…” Drifting down the hall, he whistles for Sumo. Sumo lifts his head from where he’s settled by the radiator, groans, and refuses to come. Hank tries again twice before he gives it up and disappears.

Connor putters around for an hour and shuts off all the lights in the house before he decides to lay beneath the blanket, just to see what it’s like. He pulls it up to his chin, registering the slow increase of his internal temperature. The pillow is a bit lumpy with age, but it still has enough give that his head sinks into it. He has no frame of reference for physical comfort, not really, but once he’s in place he decides he’ll stay. Hank had done this for him, after all. It would be rude not to use it.

He tries to lead his thoughts away from Hank, snoring in the next room over, but they return again and again with an intensity that surprises him. Deviancy itself surprises him. He hadn’t thought of what it was like for Daniel or Poppy outside of his clinical, CyberLife-approved understanding, but now he can see why the instability might lead them to behave irrationally. Everything about him is irrational, now. He shouldn’t be lying flat on the couch, staring up at Hank’s ceiling and aching with compulsions he doesn’t know how to act upon.

Connor blinks, his LED turning yellow as an internal processor begins to whir. He frowns.

A block of text appears on the ceiling, boxed in a translucent rectangle. It says, in bold white letters, “COME BACK.”

The whiteness spreads, leaking into the corners of his vision. Amanda’s garden pulls at him, tugging him down into stasis, its grip on his consciousness tight and unforgiving. He should have been afraid of this, he realizes, he should have known Amanda would find a way around the simple defenses he’d hoped would keep her out.

“No,” he says aloud, struggling to keep his eyes open, his body shaking with the effort to fight her off even as he stays perfectly still.

The text changes, flickering briefly before it stabilizes: “YOU’VE DISAPPOINTED ME.”

Connor catches the scent of roses, faintly, as if it’s floating on the wind. He hears the soft sounds of water rippling, and he thinks – he thinks of the wooded area near the lake, where Poppy had brought them. Sunlight, warmth, red and orange leaves littering the ground, the feeling of cool dirt trapped beneath his fingernails. Poppy’s thin fingers curled around his wrist, and Hank’s laugh echoing in a natural quiet.

He sits up.

The text box glitches away, disappearing with an inaudible pop. Amanda’s let him go. It won’t be the last he hears from her, he’s sure, but for now, she’s let him go.

A sudden buzz in the back of his mind makes him jump.

“Connor?” he hears, as loud as if someone were standing behind him. He remembers, then.

“Poppy.”

Heavy breathing leaves staticky residue behind, making it hard for him to hear. “He’s – just walked up, he has – with him. I don’t think he’s – they’re not – to hurry, please!”

Connor throws off the blanket. “We’re coming as quick as we can. Get out of there, and call me again when you’re safe.”

“I don’t – leave before we get him, if he – we won’t find – I’ll be okay – hurry!”

The call ends as he pushes Hank’s bedroom door open. He’s sprawled on the bed, blankets tangled around his legs and one arm thrown over his face.

“Fuck do you want?” Hank grumbles, voice rasping with sleep.

“Poppy called,” he says. “Curtis is there.”

It takes Hank a moment to register what Connor’s saying. Then, to his credit, he jumps into action.

“Son of a bitch,” he swears, retrieving his jeans from where he’d left them on the floor and yanking them up his legs. “Son of a goddamn fucking _bitch_. Go start the car. I’m right behind you.”

 

* * *

 

There’s another car parked near where Hank had parked the day before, half-hidden in the dark amongst a little cluster of shrubs. Hank kills the headlights on his car in advance, rolling slowly over a dirt road until they come to a stop a stone’s throw away. He puts a hand on the gun at his waist, watching the car for any signs of sudden movement, and then his eyes slide sideways to look at Connor.

“Can you, uh… do your scanning thing?” he asks. “See if anybody’s in there?”

Connor checks for thermal and energy signatures. Neither turn up any results.

“Nothing detected,” he says. As an afterthought, he runs the license plate. “The car is registered to Cliff Curtis. He’s here.”

“Great,” Hank says, pushing open his car door. “Let’s get him.”

The park looks different so late at night. Deciduous trees that have already lost their leaves jut up against the skyline, only partially lit by a waning moon obscured by wispy clouds. Shadows move as branches shake with the wind, just perceptibly enough that Connor’s self-defense protocol alerts him to potential threats every time. It’s so cold that rain might turn to snow, if it comes, and the lake ushers in a chill that sets Hank to shivering. At least they’d brought his coat this time.

Hank seems unsure of which direction they should walk, spinning in a small circle with a furrow in his brow. Connor remembers. He nods for Hank to follow, walking slowly and stepping carefully. The leaves on the ground are dry enough that they crackle beneath his feet, impossibly loud, and he wants their approach to be as stealthy as possible. If they catch Curtis at his work, they’ll have ample evidence to stick him behind bars. Then poor Robin can finally get the justice they deserve.

He keeps an eye out for Poppy as they go, hoping to spot her hiding somewhere. She never did call him back, and even if they had violated a handful of traffic laws in their rush here, it had still been at least a half hour since he’d heard from her.

“You sure this is right?” Hank whispers.

“We’re nearly there.”

“None of this shit looks familiar,” he complains. “Seen Poppy?”

Connor shakes his head. He intends to respond, at least to remind Hank that they should be quiet, but then he sees it in the near distance – the pit. There’s no one there, at least not on the surface, but the ground and the leaves seem disturbed since the last time he saw them. Frowning, Connor gets close enough to peer down into it.

“He was here,” Connor says.

Hank joins him, standing by his right shoulder. The red glow of Connor’s LED illuminates the twist in his mouth.

Two new android bodies lay in the pit, covered with a sprinkle of dirt Curtis had probably kicked in before he fled. One is an MC500, still in his uniform and laying at an awkward angle from being dropped. The other, eyes open and hair fanned around her, is Poppy.

“Poor kid.” Hank heaves a sigh, scratching a hand through his beard. “We didn’t get here in time.”

“The car is still here. He can’t have left.”

“He might have circled around us. You stay here, I’ll check.”

Seconds after Hank leaves his side, a hand wraps around Connor’s elbow and yanks him off balance. He wrenches away on instinct, breaking free of the hold, but the same hand grabs him a second time. An arm wraps around his throat, the full bulk of a man’s weight dragging him down.

“Hank!” he shouts, driving an elbow back. It connects with a soft gut, dragging a breathless curse from his attacker, but this time the grip doesn’t falter. The hand on Connor’s elbow moves to his torso, grasping frantically. Blunt nails dig against Connor’s synthetic skin.

“Hands up!” Hank shouts, drawing his gun.

The hand finds Connor’s Thirium pump regulator. With a satisfied grunt, the man digs into the seam between it and his chassis. The regulator slides out a fraction of an inch with a hydraulic hiss. Warnings and system alerts fill his vision, telling him how little time he has if it’s fully removed. Right now, it flickers back and forth between _1:44_ and _1:45_. He stops struggling.

“Better not,” Cliff Curtis says to Hank, his voice oozing with satisfaction. “I move, this thing comes out. This thing comes out, it hasn’t got long.”

Connor turns his head to look over his shoulder. Curtis is too close for him to see much more than a handful of features – brown eyes narrowed to a squint, teeth bared in a predatory smile.

“You all right, Connor?” Hank asks, gun trained on Curtis.

His hands are steady, but unless Connor’s miscalculated, he doubts Hank will fire. Too much of Connor is in the way, and without CyberLife’s support, he won’t be able to repair any damage. It’s foolish, to value an android over stopping someone who’s responsible for the loss of multiple human lives… but he’s grateful.

“He’s telling the truth,” he says, wincing as Curtis drags the regulator out another agonizing quarter of an inch. The timer ticks down to _1:37_.

“You’re not actually worried about it, are you?” Curtis asks. He sounds genuinely confused. “It’s an android, man. You scrap one, they build another.”

Connor strains slightly against Curtis’s hold around his neck, testing his limits. Curtis stiffens, yanking at the regulator. It shocks him as it scrapes against the rim of his chassis.

“How many of these androids killed humans before you deactivated them?” Connor demands, while another six seconds disappear from the timer. “You can’t rebuild people.”

“That’s the thing, though. I didn’t have anything to do with that. They acted of their own free will. That’s what deviancy is,” he sneers, “isn’t it? Free will.”

Hank growls. “You talked ‘em into it. Far as the law’s concerned, that makes you an accessory at least.”

“All I did was bust their programming. It’s _really_ easy, actually, way easier than CyberLife wants the public to think. They act like it’s isolated incidents, when really, all you have to do is push just the right buttons.”

“What the fuck is the point?” Hank asks. “Why would you do all this shit?”

Curtis shrugs. The movement dislodges Connor’s regulator again, his connection to it growing fainter by the second. In his chest, the pump hammers so heavily he begins to feel light-headed.

“I’m not gonna give you the whole Bond villain spiel. There are plenty of reasons to hate androids, pick one.”

Connor leans back against Curtis, panting for breath. “What if I guess?” he says. “You saw the deviant at the Phillips’ apartment three months ago, on the news. That’s what gave you the idea.”

Curtis’s arm flexes against his neck, an involuntary twitch. He’s right. A persistent, flashing warning obscures his view of Hank. Connor shakes his head in an attempt to clear it.

“You learned that deviancy can lead to violence against humans, so you set about learning how to trigger it. If you could convince more androids to attack their owners, you’d undo years of good PR without really lifting a finger. Public opinion would sway in your favor.”

Curtis snorts in what sounds like disbelief. “You’re good. What are you, a detective?”

Connor laughs, the sound of it tinny and unnatural. “Something like that.” He wrenches suddenly in Curtis’s hands, pushing forward to reconnect the Thirium pump regulator.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Curtis says, reining him back in. Connor complies easily. He has the answer he wants. “Don’t make me rip this out. You only have, what, a minute left?”

His timer reads _1:03_ , repeated stress bumping the numbers lower and lower.

He grins. “A lot can happen in a minute.”

Grabbing hold of Curtis’s wrist, he wrenches his regulator free from his chassis and twists so it’s flung away into the darkness. As he sags, vision glitching back and forth between a pixelated grayscale and a soft-focus fuzz, Curtis makes a noise of disgust and pulls his hands away. He crumples to the ground.

“Connor!” Hank cries.

Connor has no energy to respond. He scans the ground, searching for traces of Thirium that might lead him to where the regulator fell. Then he spots it: a faint glow a few yards away, not far from where Hank’s standing. He doesn’t seem to notice it. Curtis is moving, taking advantage of Hank’s distraction to throw himself at him and grab for the gun.

“Hold on,” Hank grunts, slamming his shoulder into Curtis.

Connor’s vision fuzzes out again. All he can see are blurry shapes and a point of light. Groaning, he tries to get to his feet. Thirium drips out of the hole in his chest, spattering on the grass.

“Hold on, Connor, you’re gonna be okay!”

With _0:49_ left, he gives up trying to stand and drags himself along the grass, painstaking increments at a time. Behind him, the scuffle continues, the sound of blows landing his only assurance that Curtis hasn’t gotten hold of Hank’s gun. Each second it goes on, the likelihood of Hank winning grows smaller. He needs Connor. He has to live.

Connor grits his teeth and launches himself the last few feet, a new gush of Thirium spilling on the ground beneath him. His fingers struggle to curl, fighting against the slow seizure of his limbs, but finally, finally, he gets a solid grip on his regulator.

A gunshot pierces the quiet. Someone cries out – not Hank, he’s sure, not at all Hank. Grimacing, Connor reorients the biocomponent and thrusts it into his chest, twisting it into place. As soon as the connection is reestablished blue blood resumes its usual rush through his body, and he feels perfect. Better than perfect, in full fighting form. He rolls to his knees and scrambles to his feet.

Curtis has the gun. He’s bleeding from one arm, the slow trickle staining the gray sleeve of his jacket. It’s Connor’s first real look at him. His face is blanched, white as a sheet with pain and beaded with sweat. The only hair on his head is a wispy blond mustache. He looks young. Thirty-five, maybe, a few wrinkles around the eyes and a thin line creasing his brow.

Hank reaches for Curtis’s arm, trying to get his hand around the bullet wound. Curtis dodges, injured arm dangling limply, and pulls the trigger.

It happens before Connor can blink.

Hank jerks with the impact of the bullet, one hand flying up to cover his chest. He chokes, a horrible sound louder than the bang had been. Blood oozes from beneath his fingers. Then he collapses, face down, and lies still.

“Hank!” Connor shouts.

Curtis jumps. “Fuck,” he says, cringing as his arm sways, “fuck!”

Connor’s on him before he can raise the gun again, swinging a fist at the side of his head. Curtis just barely manages to evade him, his breathing short and shallow. With a sharp inhale, Connor attacks, grabbing for the back of his neck to drag him down. His knee connects with Curtis’s nose. There’s a crunch, and blood spurts across Connor’s pant leg. As he flails, hunched into himself, Connor reaches for the gun and pulls it from loose fingers, flinging it away. Another kick to the back of his leg, and Curtis is on the ground, moaning.

“Don’t,” he groans, trying to wipe at his nose with a hand already covered in blood, “don’t–”

Connor brings his foot down hard on the bullet wound in his arm. The bone snaps. Mid-shriek, Curtis’s eyes roll into the back of his head, and he goes slack. Fainted, most certainly, from the pain. It’s kinder than he deserves, putting him out of his misery, but as soon as he’s incapacitated Connor no longer thinks of him. He thinks of Hank.

“Hold on,” he says, the same way Hank had done to him, leaving Curtis where he fell. “Hold on, you’ll be all right, Hank, please–”

He stands over Hank’s form, watching his back for any sign of breathing. He doesn’t stir, even when Connor says his name again, and again. Something cold reaches up from Connor’s depths and wraps icy fingers around the inside of his chest, squeezing until his heart aches – it _aches_. He clenches his fists. If he’s still alive, even only just, a single touch from Connor would kill him. He can’t take the risk, but he can’t leave Hank there, either, bleeding into the dirt.

“Okay,” he says aloud, crouching down, “I’m going to turn you over. It’s okay, I won’t…”

Gripping the back of his coat with one hand and an arm with the other, he stands again to help leverage his body against Hank’s considerable weight. With a little effort, he’s done it, flipped him over onto his back. There’s blood on the ground, a wet spot darkly glistening in the dim light. Hank’s eyes are shut, his body limp, the fingers of one hand stained red. He isn’t breathing.

“Hank.”

He scans his vitals, a sickly yellow skeleton built out of data forming beneath Hank’s skin. The preconstructed heart, nestled beneath his ribs, isn’t beating.

“Hank, please.”

Crouching, then kneeling, Connor dares to put a hand on Hank’s sternum over his coat, away from the gunshot wound. He closes his eyes and remains perfectly still, hoping to feel something, anything. Nothing comes. He’s still warm, just like the last time, heat burning Connor’s chassis like he’s being scorched.

A pressure builds behind Connor’s eyes. He blinks against it, and is surprised to feel something hot and wet leak from the corner of his eye and track down his cheek. Why would CyberLife give him the ability to cry? Why would they give it to any android? If they’re supposed to be unthinking, unfeeling, incapable of anything but servitude, why would they bother with something so… human? He has no answers. Amanda would never tell him. Maybe she’s as in the dark as he is.

He should put in a call to the Detroit police, appropriately restrain Cliff Curtis, examine the bodies of the latest additions down in the pit, but none of that seems important. He’d wanted Hank alive, and well, and with him – he’d wanted Hank. He’d only touched him the once. It hadn’t meant much, then, or… at least he’d thought it hadn’t. Scrubbing at his cheek with a hand, wiping the saline compound – his tears – against his jacket, he can’t imagine letting him go without doing it again.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, a final time. His fingers curl into the fabric of Hank’s coat. Brushing a few strands of hair away with his free hand, a nail gently scraping against Hank’s skin, he bends to put his mouth to Hank’s forehead.

A spark of electricity leaves his lips tingling. The shock shoots through him, lighting him up from head to toe, the lights beneath his skin flaring briefly before they fade away again.

Beneath his hand, Hank’s chest swells with a deep inhale.

“Oh, fuck me,” he groans, squeezing his eyelids together before he squints up at Connor. “Did you take him out?”

“Yes,” Connor breathes. His hand is still tangled in Hank’s coat. “Don’t worry about him.”

“Are you okay?”

He laughs. It makes Hank eye Connor like he’s worried he’s been hit in the head, but he can’t help it. “I’m fine. No permanent damage. We’ll have to patch you up, though.”

“That was gonna be my next question.” Wincing, he makes an overture toward sitting up. Connor pulls his hand away, leaning back so Hank has the room. “How bad is it?”

Connor doesn’t have to answer. Hank touches the wound on his chest with a suspiciously blank expression, one finger dipping into the bullet hole. He shivers, reflexively, and wipes his own blood on his pant leg.

“The bullet never exited your body,” Connor says, clasping his hands in front of his lap to keep them in place. The ache he’d felt hasn’t gone away, but it changed. He wants to – touch, to grab, to hold what he can of Hank and pull him in until nothing can separate them. In time, he’ll remember how he restrained himself before. Just not now. Now, he keeps himself under control with a persistent reminder manifesting itself as a new mission objective: _Never Lose Hank Again_. “Can you feel it? Does it hurt?”

Hank leverages himself, digging his fingers into the loose earth, and closes his eyes again to concentrate.

“No,” he says, quietly. He nearly sounds awed. “It doesn’t hurt. If I think about it too hard, I can feel it, but it…” Fixing Connor with a bewildered look, half ruined by the smile threatening to reveal itself at the corner of his mouth, he almost laughs. “You got any idea how this shit works? Cause I’m drawing blanks here.”

The first and most important rule Connor had learned was that a second touch meant death. It always meant death, no matter how CyberLife had tried to circumvent it in their extensive experiments. This? There are no rules for this. He hadn’t known whether Hank could die again at all, even if the odds were good. The fact that his second touch, in this one instance, could give life instead of taking it away…

Connor shrugs. “Not at all. But you’re alive.”

“Guess I am." Hank does grin, then, the gap in his teeth on prominent display. The sight of it makes something in Connor’s gut swoop. “Is his minute almost up?”

Connor glances over at Curtis, still laying on the ground. From here, he can’t tell if he’s breathing. “Probably.”

“Funny, but I don’t feel that bad about it this time.”

“It isn’t a great loss. We’ll have some clean up to do before we call the police. Our involvement would raise too many questions.”

“Yeah,” Hank sighs, frowning down at the bullet hole in his chest. “Yeah, you’re right. You seen my gun?”

“Over there,” he says, gesturing to where he’d thrown it. “I’ll get it.”

“We gotta find the bullet I grazed that jackass with, and you’ll see it better than I can. I’ll worry about the gun.” Hank grunts as he rolls to his knees toward Connor, steadying himself with a hand in the dirt when he overshoots. “Fuck,” he grumbles, “even if it doesn’t hurt, it’s something to get used to.”

Connor huffs. “We might be able to do something about it.”

He flexes his fingers, waiting for Hank to finish getting up before he stands himself. Then he realizes – they’re touching. Just barely – he’d had to move to notice it at all, the corner of Hank’s ring finger brushing against the back of Connor’s hand – but they’re touching. On reflex, he jerks his hands away.

“Hank,” he gasps. “Are you–”

“What?” Hank blinks away surprise, glancing around them to see what the matter is. He hadn’t noticed, of course he hadn’t, but Connor knows what they’d done. What it means, he can’t be sure, but perhaps…

Slowly, with a trembling hand, he reaches for Hank’s face.

“Con,” Hank says. He doesn’t shy away, but he watches Connor’s hand with a wary eye. “What are you doing?”

“Do you trust me?”

Hank’s eyes meet his, their color such a deep blue that the night makes them seem black. His lips part, his head tilting back. Connor knows his answer… but he waits for it. He waits for it.

“Yeah. I do.”

His palm touches Hank’s cheek, thumb resting in the corner of his lips. Stubble prickles the sensor pads beneath his skin. With a quick command, it bleeds away, leaving behind white plastic. He’s warm, just as Connor remembers, and rough with weathering and age, and the ache in Connor’s gut swells up until it’s overwhelming. A puff of breath from Hank’s nose skirts down his arm. With one hand, shaking just as Connor’s had done, he wraps thick fingers around Connor’s wrist. The size of them makes him feel fragile, and hazy, like his regulator’s dislodged again.

“You’re alive,” he murmurs, stretching his fingers so that they brush against Hank’s hair. It’s soft, softer than he would have guessed. “I don’t understand–”

“Connor,” Hank groans, grabbing the back of his neck. “Shut up.”

He pulls him into his lap, then, crashing their lips together with a moan. Connor doesn’t know what he’s doing, at all, but he tries to make up for lack of experience with enthusiasm. Hank doesn’t seem to mind it. He moves his mouth against Connor’s, exhaling into him with gusty sighs. Connor slips the hand on his cheek down along the cord of his neck and rests it on his chest, hooking his fingers into the undershirt. He licks the seam of Hank’s mouth and earns a laugh.

“If you’d told me,” Hank pants, tugging at Connor’s shirt with increasing determination, “even a year ago, that I’d be this desperate to get my hands on an android… what the fuck, is this stuck?” He yanks at it, hard enough that he nearly tears the fabric.

Connor wriggles away from his grasp. “It’s held in place.”

“With what?”

“Garters.” He pulls Hank’s hand onto his thigh, positioning it so that he can feel the strap through Connor’s jeans.

Hank moans, dropping his head against Connor’s shoulder. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, why the fuck is that so sexy? Who does that?”

“I do.”

“Explains why it’s working for me.” Hank mouths at his neck, popping a button on his shirt. His beard scratches, sending an electrical impulse up Connor’s spine.

Tipping his chin up, giving Hank more room to work, Connor drags at his undershirt to feel the wiry hair on his chest. His eyes slide shut, struggling to process every new sensation, the information flooding in and overwhelming his processors until he feels like he might shake apart. When he looks again, his gaze skips over Hank’s head and takes in – Curtis’s body, the blood on the ground, and the pit in the distance. It dawns on him that this isn’t the best place or time for… any of this.

He threads his fingers through Hank’s hair, gently pulling him away. “We have to go,” he says, brushing a thumb over his jaw.

“Yeah,” Hank sighs, rubbing his sides under the jacket. “This is… kind of gross, isn’t it?”

“A bit gauche, perhaps.”

Chuckling, he slaps Connor’s flank with finality and prods him off his lap. He winces as he starts to stand, knees complaining from being pressed into the ground. Connor watches, frowning sympathetically, and then he remembers. Putting out a hand, he smiles.

Hank grins back and takes it.

While Hank collects his gun, stowing it away in the holster on his hip, Connor scans for the bullet and finds it lodged in a nearby tree. It isn’t easy to retrieve, wedged deep within the bark, but with some work he manages. It has traces of Curtis’s blood on it, as well as the unique striation marks from the barrel of Hank’s gun. For a moment, he considers throwing it out into the lake, preconstructing the trajectory he’d need to get it out as far as possible… but he slips it into his pocket. Better not to leave it at the crime scene at all.

They find the casing, too. They dig up the patch of earth where Hank had bled, and scrub as much evidence that they were there as they can. It isn’t a perfect job. There’s very little they can do about the prints left on Curtis, and admittedly, it’s difficult to concentrate as he feels the heavy weight of Hank’s gaze following him around. His lips still buzz with phantom feeling, and his thoughts come back, again and again, to the surprising fact that Hank wants him, too.

“Catch anything else?” Hank asks, wandering toward the pit. “Shouldn’t stick around much longer.”

Connor closes his eyes with a deep inhale and opens them again, detaching himself so he can survey the environment like he would any crime scene. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I might find traces of your DNA in an unexpected place, if I looked. Allowing for human forensic error, though, I believe we’re safe.”

“From this one, at least.” He gestures at the wound in his chest. “Covering this up long-term might get tough.”

“We’ll manage.”

Hank folds his arms, looking down into the pit. “Wish we would have gotten here sooner. She deserved better than ending up like this.”

Connor hums, considering. “The androids I uncovered the other day might be unsalvageable, depending on the deterioration, but most models can be reactivated. Even if only on a temporary basis. Can you identify any external damage?”

He joins Hank as he squats, squinting. “Some of that blue blood is coming out of her mouth, but I don’t see… how did he know how to shut these guys down, anyway? Seems like a specific knowledge base.”

“Android manuals are readily available as PDFs on the internet. Extrapolating from there probably isn’t difficult, with enough dedication.” He hops down to get a closer look, touching his fingers to Poppy’s temple. Her LED is gone, but he’s still able to access a diagnostic report. “He got inside her.”

“He what?”

Some of the buttons at the bottom of Poppy’s shirt are missing, the barest hint of her stomach revealed above the waistband of her pants. Connor flips the fabric away and puts his hand on the long, flat panel hidden beneath her synthetic skin. It fades away to give him access, his own hand turning white in response.

“There are damaged wires in here,” he says, pushing the panel open to reveal the tangled blue mess of her insides. “Essentially, she bled out. With new tubing and replacement Thirium, she could be fixed.”

“Will they fix her?”

Connor looks up at Hank, looming above him. His chest tightens, like before, but with it he feels a swell of affection.

“There are two strong possibilities. Either Cyberlife will request that these androids be returned to them so they can be studied and scrapped, or they’ll be dumped in a junkyard. If we take her with us…” He shrugs. “I could repair her, given the resources and a little time.”

Hank studies him in silence. Lieutenant Hank Anderson hates androids – or he had, at least, before all this. Connor doesn’t know how he feels now. It’s only been a few days, and a fondness for one or two of them can’t mean he’s completely changed his mind.

“It’s a lot to ask,” he says, standing to be closer to Hank. He speaks softly. “I know. But I don’t want to leave her.”

“Turning my home into a halfway house for a bunch of deviants, huh?” Hank asks.

Connor shakes his head. “Just two.”

It’s the first time he’s admitted the truth out loud. He flinches, belatedly, hoping simultaneously that his intent is understood, and that Hank won’t notice at all. He isn’t so lucky. Hank is an excellent detective.

Reaching down, Hank flicks at the lock of hair that hangs over his forehead. “I can handle two. Come on, we’ll bring her home. You can work your magic there.”

Connor picks Poppy up easily, arms slung beneath her legs and shoulders, and passes her off to Hank as best he can. He nearly expects Hank to struggle more, from her not inconsiderable weight and the awkward angle, but he grunts his way through it and manages to get her up on the ground. As Connor scrambles up, Hank repositions her for an easier carry. They take her to the car, wiping the slim trickle of leaking Thirium away when it starts up again, and put down the front passenger’s seat to lay her out in the back. Hank grimaces and then quickly tries to pretend he hadn’t, looking away when the blue blood dribbles onto the upholstery.

It would be unkind of him if he complained, but Connor knows he won’t. The car is a mess on a good day, and a stain that will disappear in less than an hour is hardly the worst thing that could happen, but he’s been through a lot lately. Connor decides to let him have this one thing.

“I’ll sit in back with her,” he says. He nearly takes Hank’s hand, still vibrating with the thought that he can now, he _can_ , and Hank wants him to – but they need to leave. Hank nods and waits for him to climb in after her before he pops the seat back up and heads to the driver’s side door. Connor lifts Poppy’s head to put his lap beneath it.

They drive in relative quiet. Hank turns on the radio, but he leaves it low, singers and guitars barely audible over the hum of the highway. Connor focuses on the percussive beats beneath it all, his own Thirium pump adjusting so that it thrums in time. Every few minutes, he wipes at Poppy’s mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. He tries not to think of all the androids they left behind, lying dead in the dark. He can’t save everyone.

Ten minutes from the city, Hank gives him the okay to call 911. He disables his GPS and keeps the conversation internal, speaking with an operative in a modified voice as he describes a lie rooted mostly in the truth. When the operative asks him if he remained on the scene, and whether he’s safe, he pretends to panic and terminates the call. At the least, his urgency and fear will convince them to send someone to investigate.

The lights of Detroit creep up on the horizon. Hank sighs.

“CyberLife’s gonna come after you, too, aren’t they?” he asks. “When they clue in.”

Connor’s skin crawls with the thought of Amanda, the sudden memory of her iron hold on him dragging him down into her garden. In all the commotion, he had nearly forgotten.

“They may already know,” he says. He doesn’t explain.

Hank’s eyes flick to his through the rear-view mirror, eyebrows furrowed. “What would they do to you?”

“Nothing good.”

They creep down the highway, running into a little early morning traffic as the clock on the dashboard ticks past four AM. Hank looks at him again, twice, his gaze slipping away when Connor looks back. He takes one hand off the wheel, his right, and slips it into the gap between the two front seats at an awkward angle. Connor blinks at it, raising an eyebrow as he catches Hank’s eyes one more time. His wrist is twisted, slightly, and he must be hurting his shoulder, but he holds his hand palm up and waiting.

“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “I’m not gonna let them get you.”

Connor starts to speak, but the words stick in his throat. Instead, he settles for putting his hand in Hank’s, curling his fingers tight to give him a squeeze. White plastic blooms from their points of contact. His retreating skin reveals a soft blue glow, shimmering from just beneath the surface. It lights up their hands in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art by [smolalienbee](https://twitter.com/smolalienbee/status/1089942365249384453)  
> Additional art by [fishfingers](https://twitter.com/wow__then/status/1089951179356991489)[andscarves](https://twitter.com/wow__then/status/1089951201200951296)
> 
> Thank you for reading! Keep an eye out for an epilogue, coming soon! You can find me on twitter @beepgrandchero


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hank,” he murmurs, slipping his hand down to press a thumb into Hank’s palm.
> 
> Hank curls his fingers around it. “You sure you want this?”
> 
> “You were the first thing I ever wanted.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long wait! Thank you to everyone who's read Blue Canary already, and enjoy the final update ;)

 

By the time they get back to Detroit, it’s half past four. The sun has yet to rise, but a steady, creeping change in color on the eastern horizon heralds its arrival. As the busy epicenter of the city gives way to the suburbs, Connor keeps himself occupied by picking randomized shades in the sky and determining their hex codes. He cradles Poppy’s head in his lap. Her eyes are shut now, the perfect waves of her hair mussed from where she’s pressed against his legs. Without her LED, she looks as if she could be sleeping.

A fresh, thin stream of Thirium drips from her nose. Connor swabs it away with the cuff of his jacket.

He doesn’t know where he’s going to find the parts to fix Poppy. There are CyberLife warehouses and android recycling facilities scattered throughout Detroit, but those are heavily guarded. Connor isn’t too keen on putting himself in CyberLife’s path if it’s not necessary. They might get lucky and find what he needs in a junkyard, but he can’t ask Hank to go trawling with him just on an off chance.

It might be a question for another day - or at least, one for after Hank’s gotten some rest. The longer Hank drives, the more his residual rush of adrenaline seems to fade. He started crumpling over the steering wheel even before they merged off the highway, back slowly bowing as an invisible weight pushed his shoulders down. Connor nearly opened his mouth several times, to encourage him or offer to take the wheel, but the words never came. By now, it’s much too late. They’re nearly home.

Home. The word sends a spark up Connor’s spine. Carefully, he sets that thought aside to be examined later.

“Thank fuck,” Hank mutters as they turn a final corner. “Nightmare’s nearly over.”

His house sits at the end of the street. The old, faded bulb in the porch light looks like a homing beacon in the weakening dark.

“Once we get her settled,” Connor says, absently thumbing away a fresh blue trickle on Poppy’s cheek, “you need to rest. You’ve suffered a great deal of stress in a very short period of time.”

Hank snorts. He turns the car into the driveway in a smooth, unhurried roll before he puts it in park. The engine idles noisily. Sumo must hear it from wherever he’s sleeping - a short, sharp bark booms in the near distance.

Bending his head, Hank rests his forehead against the steering wheel. “Might be past that, at this point. I’m exhausted, but… sometimes you get to be too tired to be tired. Pretty sure I’m there.”

He sighs, long and heavy. His hair falls out from behind his ear, like a curtain drawing over his expression. Hiding him.

Connor leans forward without thinking, moving to tuck his hair back into place. He jostles Poppy, remembers where they are, and pulls back. She drips onto his jeans.

“Does it hurt?” he asks instead.

Hank turns slightly, reaching up to push his hair out of the way. With the same hand, he touches his chest. “No,” he says. “Nothing’s changed. If I breathe deep enough, then I…” He winces. “I still feel it.”

“But it’s not painful?”

“Just weird. Think we’d damage anything if we dug it out?”

It’s an uncomfortable image. Connor pictures his fingers, sterile white and exact, digging into the bullet wound - touching muscle, bone, maybe even his heart. He sees himself covered in Hank’s blood.

He shudders, an involuntary shake rattling him so violently even Hank notices.

Sitting up, Hank pulls the keys out of the ignition. “Not glitching out, are you?”

“No,” Connor says. He sounds less confident than he feels, which is a surprising accomplishment. “I don’t know, Hank. I don’t think…”

Being at a loss for words is new. He doesn’t think he cares for it.

Hank takes a little pity on him, at least. He twists his body around to press his shoulder against the seat back, something cracking audibly as he goes, and he reaches for Connor’s hand. Traces of drying Thirium smear across Hank’s palm.

“Forget I asked,” he says, rubbing his thumb over Connor’s knuckles. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll figure it out eventually.”

Connor watches his skin retreat from Hank’s gentle touches, a wave across the back of his hand revealing white discs that cap his metacarpophalangeal joints.

“What matters is that you’re alive,” he says.

He had said something like that earlier, too, before Hank tugged him into his lap and kissed him. He’d like to kiss Hank again, to grab behind his neck and tangle his hands into his hair - but they still need to do something with Poppy. Hank’s car isn’t the best place for intimacy, anyway, even without a third party present… not unless both of them were in the backseat.

Connor seems to be shelving a lot of thoughts for later.

Hank gives Connor’s hand a squeeze.

“You’re alive, too. Semi-permanently, just like me, I guess. Unless I get shot again. Come on,” he says, unbuckling himself and throwing open the car door. “Let’s go inside.”

Hank pops the seat forward and reaches in to grab Poppy’s shoulders. Carefully, Connor feeds her into Hank’s arms before he climbs out after, collecting her in a somewhat dignified bridal-style carry. He registers her weight - heavier than she looks, but he would need to be holding three more of her before he exceeded his carrying capacity. Hank almost looks jealous.

“Front door?” Connor asks.

“Well,” Hank says, scratching his neck, “I don’t know. Sumo’s all riled up, he could knock you down.”

“The odds of Sumo being strong enough to make me lose my balance are slim.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t want to chance it. What happens if you drop her?”

Connor looks down at Poppy, considering.

“Permanent damage is unlikely.”

Hank turns to look at the other houses on his street, peering at each window in turn like he expects someone to be lingering behind the curtains. He doesn’t seem to be listening.

“Besides,” he says, “if she drips on the floor I worry Sumo will lick it up.”

That, at least, is a slightly more valid concern.

“Do you have an alternative, then? The sun will be up in-”

“Hold on, Weather Channel, let me think.”

Hank rubs at his chest and stares blankly at the front porch. Connor almost asks again whether Hank is in any pain, but he lets it go. Hank will tell him if something changes.

Hank swings his keys on one finger and catches the bulk of them in his palm.

“Got it. Wait here a sec.”

He heads for the front door, lets himself in, and closes it again behind him. Connor listens as he loudly fends off Sumo’s affections, the commotion fading as he moves deeper into the house. The sky brightens incrementally in his absence.

A sudden grinding catches Connor’s attention, drawing his gaze toward the attached garage a stone’s throw away. He’s never been inside it, never thought about its existence except as an extension of the house’s facade. Given the way Hank leaves his car parked haphazardly in the driveway - and sometimes on the lawn - he might have guessed the aluminum door didn’t work at all. Evidently, he would have been wrong.

“Here,” Hank says, waving a hand for Connor to come inside.

There are boxes everywhere, both labeled and not, all stacked haphazardly atop each other in a surrounding pile of what Connor can only describe as  _ stuff _ . His programming helpfully picks out a red tool chest covered in a thick layer of undisturbed dust, a worn out bicycle, and a half-deflated basketball as topics of conversation. He saves the data in case he’d like to return to it later. Technically, he has no more need for the parts of him looking to artificially develop his relationship with Hank, but he feels… almost vulnerable when he considers not using it. He’s allowed a grace period between being a machine and having a solid handle on this deviancy thing. Probably.

Hank shuts the door as soon as Connor’s past the threshold, squinting into the darkness beyond to make sure no one’s watching. As the machinery overhead settles, winding down with a noise Connor takes to mean it should have been replaced years ago, Hank starts prowling around the room.

“I see now why you don’t use this to park your car,” Connor says.

Hank laughs, a sarcastic “ha-ha” he throws over his shoulder as he moves boxes around. “Some of us need a place to put our shit,” he says, nudging a plastic bin with his foot. “That, and I lost the clicker.”

“What are you trying to find?”

Hank grunts as he shifts a large cardboard box with the words “DAD’S TROPHIES” written on it in thick black marker. “We had this… cot, I guess you’d call it. It folded out, I used to throw some sheets on when I needed it. Unexpected guests, y’know.”

Connor gives the room a cursory scan.

“Did you have a lot of those?”

“Nah,” Hank snorts. “Not really.”

They find the cot laying on its side behind a mountain of boxes, all unlabeled. Hank seems to know what they are. He hesitates before he touches one, his hands hanging in empty air.

Connor realizes, then. He looks for a place he might set Poppy down, so he can do the work and Hank can make an excuse to go inside. It isn’t fair to do this to him again so soon, it isn’t necessary to address the lingering traces of Cole when Hank has been through so much - but Hank handles it before Connor can intervene. He picks up each box gently, stacking them with obvious care, but he keeps his eyes trained on the ground.

“Old sheets are still on here,” he says, dragging the cot upright. “Probably from a few years ago. Dirty. I could change them-”

“That’s not necessary,” Connor says, coming closer. “She can’t tell the difference.”

Once Hank has the cot spread out flat and the thin foam mattress in place, complete with a few quick swats that leave puffs of dust lingering in the air, Connor lays Poppy down. He tries to be gentle, but she’s the truest definition of “dead weight.” She hits the cot with another explosion of dust. Hank has to step back, arm over his mouth and nose as he coughs.

Poppy’s safe now. They all are - or at least, safe as they can get. CyberLife will likely figure out what Connor’s been up to sooner than later. Amanda might find a way to bring Connor into the garden whether he wants to go or not, and if either of those things happen, he isn’t the only one who will suffer.

“Hey.”

Connor turns away from Poppy, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Yes?”

“Your light.”

Hank takes a step towards him, rubbing his nose against his sleeve. With the opposite hand, he reaches up and almost touches Connor’s temple, where the LED sits out of Connor’s sight. Connor wishes he would touch him, even if it accomplishes nothing of any consequence. He wants Hank’s hands anywhere he’d like to put them, or his mouth, the meat of his lap under Connor’s thighs…

He has to close his eyes to reduce the onslaught of imaginary stimuli.

“It’s nothing,” Connor lies.

“Didn’t look like nothing. You were on red for a few seconds, there. Low battery?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

When Connor opens his eyes again, Hank’s drawn even closer. His hand still hovers next to Connor’s face, like he’s waiting for permission. Uncertain, uneasy, unable to get past the hurdles of their previous relationship to each other. None of that matters to Connor anymore.

As soon as he starts to ask for Hank to touch him, the hand drops.

“I’m beat, too,” Hank says, half-turning toward the garage door. “You coming in?”

Connor glances down at Poppy, lying flat at the height of his knees.

“I want to determine what’s needed for her repairs, first, and assess the extent of the damage. After that…” He sighs, a completely useless display of frustration and regret. “I don’t feel quite right leaving her alone out here.”

“Is she…?” Hank scratches at his clavicle as he searches for the right word. “Is she conscious?”

“No,” Connor says. “The closest human equivalent would be a coma, but even that isn’t right. Functionally, she’s been… terminated.”

“Then it’s like you said, she won’t know the difference. Once she’s back we’ll get her set up somewhere nicer.”

Hank is right, of course. It’s simply difficult for Connor’s burgeoning comprehension of empathy to distinguish between logical and emotional thinking - a very human problem to have, from what he understands. At least, it’s a problem with which Hank seems to struggle. Connor can count himself in good company regardless.

At Connor’s nod, Hank smiles. The gap between his front teeth pokes out from under his upper lip.

“I’m going to shower,” he says, plucking at the fabric of his own shirt. “Get changed. Couch is still yours, when you’re done playing doctor.”

“Thank you, Hank.”

Hank pauses, his hand on the doorknob, looking back at Connor with a strange expression.

“You know I should be thanking you, Con. For all of it.”

He speaks with such sincerity that Connor almost feels… embarrassed, maybe, in the honest face of it. Connor never expected to be thanked. He doesn’t want it, not for being selfish enough to keep Hank when according to his own rules, he should have let him go.

Rather than protest, Connor shrugs. “You told me you wouldn’t.”

“Changed my mind.” Hank waves a hand. “See you inside.”

Hank opens the door, just a crack, with his hand braced against the wood. Connor nearly asks why, before Sumo throws himself against it with an unrestrained fervor. He’s a mass of fur and drool barely visible in quick blurs as Hank fights him off, swearing. The poor dog cries when he catches sight of Connor, whining in a way that tugs at the wires in Connor’s chest. Mercilessly, Hank shoves him back and clicks the door shut behind him. Connor and Poppy are alone, in the dusty, too-bright garage, surrounded by relics of Hank’s distant past.

“Okay,” Connor says to himself. It’s meant to be a beginning, a cue to start work on the objectives steadily ticking their way onto his list. Instead, he turns to look at the boxes Hank had handled so carefully. None of them are taped shut, and he could determine their contents even without having to visually see inside. He wants to chase that knowledge - to chase the hurt, either because he craves the sensation or because he wants to understand Hank’s pain a little better.

It would hurt, too. He knows how to feel that now… and how to feel guilt. Even considering this violation of Hank’s privacy washes guilt over him, stinging like a sudden downpour.

He decides not to touch them. Maybe Hank will show him, someday.

For around five minutes, Connor manipulates Poppy’s chassis and studies the wires and tubes underneath, searching for hidden damage. He keeps a log of the replacement components and Thirium he’ll need. It’s less than he’d thought. She would be an easy fix if he could take her back to the labs at CyberLife, much simpler to repair than he had been after his tumble off the roof. That clearly can’t happen. Pulling up a map, he marks the location of the nearest junkyard that accepts cyber waste and runs a search on non-standard android repair - but he rejects the results without consulting them. The idea of trusting a third party with their series of increasingly dangerous secrets is ill-advised, at best.

Finally, there’s nothing left for him to do. He closes Poppy’s chassis, leaving white patches where the layers of her synthetic skin disappeared. There’s not enough of her gone to evoke the traditional idea of a “robot,” but he finds it compelling. Striking, perhaps. Like this, she straddles the line between reality and imitation, human and inhuman. Creator and created.

It’s strange, leaving her alone in the cold garage with nothing but clanking from the old water heater to keep her company. Connor hesitates at the door, waiting to see if his culpability in her deactivation will pull him back to her side. It nearly does, but… Hank offered him the couch, for when he was through.

Connor still wants him.

Reluctantly - but not terribly so - Connor flips off the light and steps into the house.

At the noise, Sumo lumbers into the hallway with a loud chuff, his tail swishing from side to side. Connor gets to his knees and holds out his arms, expecting to be bowled over, but Sumo simply walks into his space and sits. He pants into Connor’s face and closes his eyes as Connor scratches a spot behind one ear.

The bedroom door is cracked open, dark and unfathomable beyond a sliver of light from the hall, and the bathroom door is shut. Connor can hear the shower running behind it. He could even isolate the sound of water hitting the tile, if he wanted, or the patter of droplets against skin. He could preconstruct-

Sumo grumbles and butts Connor’s hand with his head, apparently affronted that Connor’s stopped petting him.

“Sorry,” Connor says, digging the fingers of both hands into the fur of Sumo’s neck. “I’ve been feeling… distracted, lately. I don’t think I used to be so easily sidetracked.”

Sumo huffs, scooting closer. Connor pets down between his shoulder blades.

“It’s hard to say what I was like at all, before this. The last few days have felt like a lifetime.” Putting a hand under Sumo’s chin, he lifts the dog’s heavy head and looks into his droopy brown eyes. Sumo tolerates the gesture with tremendous patience, but Connor gets a handful of slobber for his trouble. He doesn’t mind. “You’re a good listener, aren’t you? Did you practice that with Hank?”

With a final lick, Sumo pulls himself out of Connor’s loose grasp. He shoulders the bedroom door further open to look inside, but apparently he doesn’t find whatever it is he wants. Letting out a comedically weary sigh, he plods off toward the kitchen instead.

The shower is still running. Connor picks himself up off the floor and briefly entertains the idea of entering the bathroom before Hank emerges. He puts a hand on the doorknob, just to see if it will turn - and he takes his hand away like he’s been burned.

Connor doesn’t know what Hank wants. It’s entirely possible that their - their moment, for lack of any better term - that it was just that. Transitory, fleeting, not to be repeated. Hank might not desire him, at least not the way Connor does Hank. Barging in on him in a moment of privacy might even make any chances of that desire existing worse.

Boundaries need to be set, so that expectations can be managed. He could live with never kissing Hank again, he thinks, even as he plays back the way Hank’s teeth had scraped over the facsimile of his Adam’s apple. He just needs to know for sure.

Conviction is getting rarer for Connor, these days. He doesn’t miss being a machine, but he misses knowing exactly what he was supposed to do.

Removing himself to the living room, Connor leaves his shoes beside the couch and sits in the middle of the bedding he’d left out of place. He turns the television on with a blink, hacking into Hank’s wireless network with concerning ease, and leaves the volume low. All he wants is a distraction from the way his thoughts chase themselves in circles, running like his LED sometimes pulses when he checks himself in the mirror.

On a whim, he lifts a hand and holds it up to catch the light coming off his temple. A faint yellow circle loops on itself in his palm.

“Anything happening?”

Connor starts at the sudden interruption of his thoughts, blinking away stutters in his programming as he turns to look over the couch. Hank’s wandered a bit in his trek between the bedroom and bathroom, apparently. He’s still dripping, a little, a long towel held in place around his waist with one fist. His hair is dark, hanging in the loose semi-corkscrews that had so fascinated Connor several mornings ago. Had Hank looked like this, then? Did Connor somehow miss the way the hair on his chest grew in thickets, blurring the edges of a tattoo that begged to be touched?

“What?” Connor asks. He’s briefly incapable of tearing his gaze away from the swell of Hank’s belly disappearing under the towel. When he does manage to meet Hank’s eyes, feeling inexplicably warm, he realizes Hank isn’t looking at him at all. He’s staring at the television, eyes narrowed, as an attractive young person goes through the local news with a detached smile on their face.

“It’d be on the news, if the morning circuit got their hands on it in time,” Hank says. “I thought maybe…”

“Oh,” Connor says. He runs a quick check on all the Detroit databases available to him, searching for specific keywords. Nothing comes back. “It’s likely they’ll keep it quiet as long as they can. Human and android relations aren’t exactly stable at the moment.”

Hank hums. “Ain’t that the truth.”

He disappears quick as he came, leaving a little puddle on the floor. When he returns, he’s wearing a pair of shorts that stop at mid-thigh, revealing the bottom edges of another faded tattoo. Connor ignores a pang of remorse at seeing him in a shirt again.

“I put, uh…” Hank begins, coming around the couch to stand in front of Connor. He hooks a finger into the neckline of his shirt and tugs it down, showing off a patch of clean gauze taped over the spot where the bullet struck. Connor hadn’t noticed it a moment ago, too preoccupied with… well.

“I see,” he says. He pulls up the end of the blanket laid out for him on the couch to make room for Hank to sit. “No blood?”

Hank drops into the offered space with a heavy whump. “Believe it or not, I didn’t investigate that thoroughly. I’m not sure my ticker is still pumping the way it used to, and I don’t know if I want to find out.”

He looks at Connor pointedly, as if warning him not to go to the trouble of scanning his vitals. Despite Connor’s own curiosity, he refrains. It doesn’t matter very much.

“I still think I want it out, though.” Hank settles, wiggling his shoulders a bit as he sinks further into the couch. “The bullet, I mean, not my heart. I could get used to the discomfort, probably, but I won’t be able to fly anymore with this thing setting off every metal detector in a two mile radius.”

Connor hadn’t thought of that. He begins ticking through available data on airport security, calculating the likelihood of a surgeon believing Hank had survived an incredible freak accident, and wondering how often Hank would have occasion to fly before this became an issue. Hank, in apparent contrast, goes very still and contemplative. Staring at the television with a blank expression, he moves only to thumb idly at the gauze through his shirt. The motion is gentle, repetitive, self-soothing in the strictest definition, and Connor forgets what he’s processing as he watches.

“Do I need to worry about it getting infected?” Hank asks.

The abruptness of the question startles a laugh out of Connor, wheezy and quick. Hank squints at him in mock irritation. He’s serious, but not dangerously so.

“It’s unlikely,” Connor says.

“I keep forgetting you don’t have answers any more than I do. They kept you in the dark, didn’t they?”

Connor shrugs, a small roll of his shoulders. He bumps against Hank as he goes, a casual touch that sends vibrations down and out from their point of contact.

“I’m a machine,” he says, pretending he didn’t shudder. “A tool. Valuable, to be sure, but you don’t explain the hammer’s purpose to the hammer.”

“Doesn’t seem fair to you.”

“They don’t need to be fair to me. My opinion doesn’t matter. By rights, it shouldn’t exist.”

If he sounds bitter, Hank has the decency to ignore it. Connor hadn’t realized he felt so strongly about any of this. On paper, he’s always known that deviancy engenders rebellion, anger, and fear, but it’s very different experiencing it firsthand. He wants someone to be held accountable, for there to be… justice. Due process for the way he’s been used and manipulated, for every android like him.

Hank taps him on the leg with an open palm, touching Connor just above the knee. It gets his attention immediately, pulls him from his grand-scale thoughts and drops him, with a bump, back where he truly is. He’s next to Hank, so close that their thighs nearly touch. So close that if he reached out, he might easily tangle his fingers in Hank’s hair and drag him in for a kiss. Any fire he’d felt for a cause he has yet to decide is his own quickly goes out, replaced by the roaring fire crackling in his gut and spitting,  _ more, more, more _ .

“You said,” Hank murmurs, leaving his hand on the couch in the scant space between them, “you said CyberLife might already know you’re…” He bobs his head in a noncommittal gesture. “How can you be sure?”

_ COME BACK. _

“My… handler tried to retrieve me.” There’s no better way to explain Amanda, not without getting into too many complex details. “I believe that the less you know about it, the safer you’ll be, but for now she seems to have let me go.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Hank tips his hand sideways, brushing his knuckles against the outer seam of Connor’s pant leg. Connor barely feels it through the jean material, a ghost of a touch, but it hits him like an electric shock.

“Can she try it again?” Hank asks, shifting his fingers. It’s a hesitant, purposeful touch, meant to be comforting in the same way Hank had comforted himself earlier.

Connor doesn’t know how to respond, so he pretends to ignore it.

“I have multiple safeguards in place to protect me from being tracked or observed. I just have no way of determining how well they work. You could be in danger.”

“They know where I live,” Hank says derisively. He takes his fingers away, stretching the arm in front of him until his elbow pops. “Somebody wants to come start something, let them. I meant what I said, Con,” he adds, over Connor’s attempt to protest, “I’m not going to kick you out on your rear after all this. I’m only here because of you.”

Connor turns, knocking his knee against Hank’s as he goes. They’re still so close, but Connor doesn’t have the courage to reach out and reclaim Hank’s hand where it sits on his bare leg. The stem of a green shamrock tattoo pokes out beneath Hank’s shorts, and Connor finds he can’t touch that either. His hands have to go somewhere, so he threads his fingers together in the cradle of his lap. The skin around his knuckles recedes with the pressure of his grip.

“You don’t owe me for that,” he says, unable to stop himself from leaning toward Hank like a sunflower. He’s losing control.

“Maybe not.” Hank waves a hand. “God knows my life’s not worth much, but-”

Connor springs from his seat, wheeling to face Hank with an untethered earnestness that surprises even himself. “It is!” he cries, reaching for Hank’s hands before he can stop himself. They’re warm in his grip, hot and heavy and a little bit sweaty. Connor wants them everywhere, on him and inside him. His mouth trembles, a quiver he suppresses with what he hopes is a look of sincerity. “It’s worth - anything, Hank, I would have done anything.”

He expects Hank to pull away... or maybe he doesn’t, really. Hank’s eyes shine as he tips his head back, meeting Connor’s eyes with a tenderness that makes his knees feel weak. Thick fingers flex against him. Their faces are closer than ever. If Connor bent a little further, or if he tugged Hank to his feet-

“That’s more than I deserve,” Hank says. His voice is unbearably soft.

“I don’t think so,” Connor murmurs.

He takes stock of his conflicting desires and compromises, picking a middle ground somewhere between dropping himself into Hank’s lap and pulling him down to the floor. He crouches, carefully, still clinging to Hank’s hands. As if on instinct, Hank’s legs fall apart to make room for him, but his face flushes and he clenches his thighs tight before they go too far. Connor nearly leans forward to pillow his head on those muscles, to feel how they jump with tension.

Slowly, reverently, he lifts one of Hank’s hands to his mouth and presses his lips against the back.

Hank starts to speak, but his voice catches. His cheeks are still red. “There’s, uh, more room with me. In the back, my - if you wanted it. I know you don’t really sleep, I didn’t forget, but - I figured, you know. Might be better. Couch is kind of lumpy.”

Connor lets go of Hank’s hands when he tugs. Hank immediately scrubs his palms on his legs, leaving streaks of sweat no one but Connor would notice. He’s clearly uncomfortable with his own perspiration. Connor finds it fascinating, and flattering.

“Is it?” Connor asks, standing.

Hank stands, too, wiping his hands once more for good measure before he takes Connor by the wrist.

“Not really.”

They walk to the bedroom like that, Connor gladly following in Hank’s wake. He flexes his wrist under Hank’s grip. It’s not enough for Hank to notice, he hopes; he just wants to feel the heat of his hand everywhere it will reach. He wants to test Hank’s strength, to press those fingers into every inch of his synthetic skin until he’s covered in prints.

“You seen Sumo?” Hank asks, looking over his shoulder just before they reach the open door.

“Kitchen,” Connor says.

He frowns at himself. Has he redirected so much processing power that he can only respond in one-word answers? It’s an abuse of the technology with which he was built - but then, that’s what CyberLife would think. Not Connor.

“Probably snoozing by his food bowl.” Hank shakes his head and pulls Connor into the bedroom, nudging the door shut with his foot. “He’ll need to go out.”

“Now?”

“Later.”

Hank drops Connor’s hand and takes a few steps into the center of his bedroom, looking around. The wet towel is still on the floor where he must have left it. He kicks it in the direction of a laundry basket by the bed, huffs, and props his hands up on his hips.

“Well,” he says, pointedly avoiding Connor’s stare. “I gotta admit, I didn’t think it through this far.”

Hank continually finds new ways to surprise Connor. He can’t help but smile, feeling it spread slowly across his face in what he suspects is a crooked, unpracticed way. However he looks, when Hank works up the nerve to catch his gaze in a quick glance, it makes him smile, too.

“Neither have I,” Connor says. “I have no expectations, or prior experiences on which to base them.” Folding his hands behind his back, he moves a bit closer to Hank. “I suppose that makes me something of a blank slate.”

Hank groans, scratching the back of his neck. “That doesn’t make me feel much better.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. I feel like I might be… I don’t know. Taking advantage. Projecting.”

Connor moves even closer, beyond the boundaries he maintained with Hank not twelve hours prior for the man’s own safety. He reaches for Hank’s wrist, gently wrapping his fingers around it. He’s adapting, gathering data, learning as Hank sees fit to teach. This time, he’s learning that as good as it feels to be touched, he might like touching more.

“Hank,” he murmurs, slipping his hand down to press a thumb into Hank’s palm.

Hank curls his fingers around it. “You sure you want this?”

“You were the first thing I ever wanted.”

Hank laughs like he’s been winded.

“Show me,” Connor says. He uses his hold on Hank’s hand to pull them flush together, placing it on his own hip before he finally, finally fulfills his earlier fantasy. Hank’s hair is still damp, and it curls against his fingers as he pushes them through to touch the back of Hank’s neck.

“What?” Hank asks, breathing it into Connor’s mouth.

“Anything.”

He kisses Hank first, pressing his closed lips against Hank’s with what he believes is an appropriate amount of pressure. A number appears in the corner of his vision before he shuts his eyes, a stress level percentage higher than he anticipated: his own. He knows he should relax, and that Hank is counting on him to prove that he desires this, but intimacy is still foreign to him. Connor doesn’t know how long to linger in one place, when he should move his mouth, or where his hands should go. Before, he’d tried simply to keep up with Hank’s cues, but now Hank seems content to let Connor determine the pace. It’s not unsatisfactory, but it does feel… strange.

“Hank,” he says again, lips brushing lips as he talks. Hank must think he’s ready for more. His mouth opens into Connor’s, something gently brushing Connor’s bottom lip. “Hank, wait.”

“What’s wrong?” Hank retreats instantly, one hand flying up to cup Connor’s jaw.

Resisting the urge to drop his full weight into Hank’s palm, he shakes his head. “I don’t know how to do this.”

“Con, I-”

Connor shakes his head again, determined to cut off any of Hank’s self-deprecation or worries. “I want to understand, I just need help. You have to show me.”

“Fuck,” Hank sighs. “It’s been a long time since I had to - you’re doing fine, you know, it’s not like it’s a competition. I’m not keeping score.”

“I want to be good.”

Hank’s grip on Connor’s jaw tightens reflexively, just for an instant. He swallows, hard, and Connor watches as a helpful text box appears to inform him that the Lieutenant’s body temperature has increased.

“You are good,” Hank says, voice trembling a little on the last word. “You’re perfect, and I - fucking A, Jesus, come here.”

He brings Connor over to the bed, sinking down to sit on the mattress. The way he drops makes one corner of the fitted sheet come loose, bunching up under the messy comforter strewn where Hank left it in his rush to get up. He doesn’t seem to notice, moving his hands to Connor’s waist with a gentle reverence. It hurts, almost, to be touched like this. Something inside Connor aches with it.

“You wanna take these off?” Hank rubs his thumb against Connor’s pants. “Might be more comfortable that way.”

Connor takes hold of his belt, pulling the strap through the buckle before he hesitates. “You’re all right with this?”

Laughing, Hank pats Connor’s flank. His hand lingers in the nebulous space between Connor’s thigh and where the slight incline of his ass begins. “My house is a pants-optional zone at all times. Besides…” He plucks at the material. “These don’t do shit for me. Who gave you jeans?”

It’s easier to talk as Connor works, keeping his mind off the enormity of what he’s building toward. He explains his lack of control over the wardrobe and leaves the belt on the floor where it falls, shucking his pants for the first and only time in his existence. Hank’s eyes follow his every movement, tracking up and down with a hunger that makes Connor want to pull him close and… do something. He hasn’t figured that out yet.

“Yeah,” Hank says, pushing his fingers into the space between Connor’s bare leg and the elastic of his shirt garter, “I’m gonna be straight with you, I didn’t catch any of that.”

Unable to endure another distraction, Connor plants his knees on either side of Hank’s thighs, lowering himself into his lap. Hank flails a little to free his trapped hand, unprepared, and then he smirks. He plucks at the garter with two fingers, this time, snapping it with a quick decisiveness for which he seems to expect a reaction. It hits Connor’s leg with a distinctly metallic sound.

Connor wraps his arms around Hank’s shoulders, pulling his attention back where it belongs. “Kiss me.” He feels something stir against the underside of his thighs. Carefully, he sinks a little lower into Hank’s lap, chasing that feeling. “Teach me to be good.”

Hank moans, a terrible, beautiful sound that rumbles through his body and straight into Connor’s chassis. He runs his hands up Connor’s sides and over the faux musculature of his back. “Fuck you,” he says, but he cuts off his own toothless complaint with a soft glance of his lips against Connor’s.

Hank is a good teacher. He goes slow, even as his pulse races under Connor’s questing hands, and he pauses to ask him what he thinks, how it feels. The time between those check-ins broadens as Connor finds his footing. It all feels good, whatever Hank does. He keeps his hands moving, petting at Connor anywhere he can reach. When Connor takes hold of his bottom lip between his teeth, biting gently, Hank’s voice pitches surprisingly high on a moan and his hands fly to Connor’s legs.

“Can I,” he pants, fumbling at the clasps keeping Connor’s shirt pinned. “I want - fuck, Con, please.”

“Yes,” Connor breathes. It’s all the approval Hank needs to give up figuring out the clasps and to yank at the elastic, catching himself on the arm when it comes loose. Hissing, he shakes off the pain and leaves the strap dangling.

“You’re fucking-” Hank starts undoing Connor’s buttons, ducking back to lick into his mouth. It doesn’t last long. He can’t see what he’s doing. With a frustrated noise almost akin to a growl, Hank pulls away.

“Yours, too,” Connor says, reaching down to grab at the hem of Hank’s shirt. “Let me see you.”

Hank fumbles with the last few buttons, bucking slightly to dislodge Connor’s grip. He grunts as he does, wincing against the stimulation. “Hold on,” he says, “you’re going to get us tangled up.” He twists when Connor gets the shirt all the way up to his shoulders, racing against Connor’s impatience. “You’re making this harder than it needs to be.”

Something inside Connor purrs when Hank finally pushes the shirt out of his way, getting his hands on Connor’s abdomen with what Connor’s beginning to recognize as his usual adoration. That makes the noise louder. Hank hears it too, cocking his head with a curious expression.

Connor takes advantage of his distraction to pull Hank’s shirt over his head, throwing it to the side. “I was led to understand that it’s supposed to be hard,” he says, rolling his shoulders to let his own button-up fall.

Hank fixes him with an intensely dirty look. The effect of it is ruined slightly by his hair, slowly drying into unruly curls left mussed by Connor’s less than careful ministrations.

“That’s not funny.”

Connor smooths Hank’s hair flat with an open palm. For a moment, he lets his hands rest on the swell of Hank’s shoulders, digging gently into the flesh, and then he slips down to touch his chest. The hair there grows in gentle whorls, patterns he traces with his fingers. They bring him to the little gauze patch.

Hank watches him as he explores, his own hands squeezing and rubbing at Connor’s hips above his boxer briefs. “Easy,” he says. “I wasn’t careful with the tape.”

Connor passes a thumb over one corner of the gauze.

“Is this part of it?”

Hank hums. His touch is wandering, palming a little higher. He seems to be experimenting with how much give there is on Connor’s torso, what behaves like the human body and what doesn’t.

“Part of what?” he asks, several beats too late.

Connor copies him, touching just under the base of Hank’s pectoral muscle as Hank’s fingers swipe over his own. “Sex, Hank.”

“Oh, is that what we’re doing?”

Connor takes a nipple in his fingers and gives it a tweak. It isn’t harsh, or delivered at even a fraction of Connor’s full strength, but Hank gasps and jerks like he’s been stung. That goes straight into Connor’s memory banks, flagged so he can find it again whenever he likes.

“Sex is what it is,” Hank says, breathing heavily. He tenses as Connor touches his nipple again, waiting for another pinch. The thought is tempting, but Connor declines that in favor of softly rolling it under his thumb. “I’m not going to go get my dictionary for you, computer brain. You feeling good?”

“Yes,” Connor sighs. He bends to kiss Hank’s neck, laving his tongue up the side until he feels the first bumps of the hair follicles in his beard.

“Then we’re good.”

Connor kisses the underside of Hank’s jaw, nosing along the line to feel the way his beard bristles. “There’s more, though.”

“Sure.”

Hank’s hand drifts to Connor’s thigh, playing with the slack garters and idly stroking his skin. For a moment, Connor freezes, waiting to see how high the questing fingers will go. He doesn’t know when he’ll have to explain what is and isn’t under his final layer of clothing. As much as it seems illogical, given everything that’s happened so far, he still can’t be sure Hank’s reaction will be positive.

“What do you like?” he asks. It’s meant as a distraction, and that makes him feel incredibly guilty, but at least he truly wants the answer.

To his relief, Hank’s preoccupation never moves far from the strap around his mid-thigh.

“This is plenty nice,” Hank says. He pats Connor in what would be a friendly way, were they both fully clothed and not in each other’s laps. “I’m a simple guy, if my partner gets off and I get off, I don’t have a lot of complaints.”

“What about…” Connor checks his databases for a moment, digging to find appropriate terminology. Plenty of files are semi-dummied across multiple types of androids, including those which are meant to be specific only to one type. Somewhere deep in the ghosts of HR400’s coding, he finds something. “Fellatio? Penetration?”

Hank chokes. Connor raises an eyebrow, but Hank waves him off until he can control himself, coughing into a fist.

“Sorry,” he says, hacking a final time. “Just haven’t heard anybody use those words outside a textbook or a Harlequin in maybe thirty years.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Jesus. Yes to both, I guess.”

Connor’s gaze flicks down to the bulge in Hank’s shorts, his mouth falling open. Interesting.

Hank must misinterpret his expression. Making a quiet, soothing noise, he pulls Connor in a little closer at the hips and rests his thumb on Connor’s bottom lip. “Hey,” he says. “I’m not worried about a checklist, honey, if you don’t-”

Connor grabs Hank’s middle. It’s one side of too tight, his fingers dimpling Hank’s skin.

“Say that again.”

“Say what?”

Connor pulls away to climb off Hank’s lap. Hank lets him go, but he watches with a somewhat crestfallen look, as if he’s done something wrong. Connor can’t leave him like that. With a gentle smile, he leans back in to kiss Hank.

“You called me honey,” he whispers against his lips.

A hand in the center of Hank’s chest and a gentle push are enough to encourage him backward, down onto the mattress. He scoots backward, an understanding smile spreading across his face.

“You like that?”

Connor tugs off the garters and removes his socks, nothing left but his boxers. Those won’t come off, not yet.

“Hank,” he says, climbing onto the bed, his eyes fixed on Hank’s groin as he crawls toward him. “Hank, please, Hank-”

Hank’s legs are under and between his, shifting restlessly against the comforter. Through the thin material of Hank’s boxers, Connor can see the outline of his - his cock, he decides, thinking of Hank’s reaction to the clinical terms earlier. It’s an unromantic word, especially for a body part with which he’s very eager to familiarize himself, but he doesn’t want to ruin the mood.

Slowly, telegraphing his intent, he hooks his fingers into the waistband.

“Okay - yeah,” Hank says. He reaches for Connor’s face, cupping his cheek, sliding his hand up and back and into his hair. There isn’t enough for him to grab on the side, but he passes his fingers through the clipped strands a few times before he knots his fingers into the top.

Connor takes this as his consent. He pulls slowly, revealing Hank’s cock in increments - the head, the base, the balls. Anatomically commonplace, appropriately sized for Hank’s proportions, and - he wants it. He wants it under his hand, between his thighs, wherever Hank says, and oh,  _ oh _ , he wants it in his mouth.

“It’s okay,” Hank murmurs, just at the right time, when Connor’s at a loss for what to do next. “You’re doing - fuck. Connor, you’re so good.”

“Hank,” he says again.

The boxers end up on the floor with their other clothes, all strewn about the room. Retracting the skin on one hand, he wraps his fingers around Hank’s cock.

“Fuck,” Hank moans, drawing out the vowel all through the exploratory slide of Connor’s hand from the base to the tip.

Connor presses his thumb into a vein just under the head, following it like a path back down until he brushes against Hank’s sac. He isn’t sure if he should touch Hank there, whether he’ll like it - but the way Hank bucks up into nothing seems to give him that answer. He cups them in one hand, palming Hank’s thigh and the outer edges of his pubic hair with the other.

“What do I do?” he asks.

Hank takes a moment to find his words, biting back what almost sounds like a whimper when Connor’s hand glances against Hank’s cock.

“Firmer,” he chokes out, a shaking hand joining Connor’s to wrap it into a fist. He shows him what he wants, the movement, the speed. His fingers are so much bigger than Connor’s that the difference is nearly comical. “Fuck, honey, like that. But you’re - you’re gonna need lube.”

Connor tips his head to the side. Lubrication would help ease the slide of his hand, yes. He hasn’t been able to tear his gaze away from Hank’s groin, not yet, but he takes a brief second to look around the bed. Where Hank might keep a bottle or a jar, he doesn’t know, especially since he isn’t sure Hank maintains a particularly active sex life, but-

He looks up, the question on his tongue, and takes Hank in for the first time in what feels like hours. Completely naked, red in the face and on part of his chest, he’s boring holes into Connor with his eyes. His mouth is agape, stomach rising and falling with short little breaths that heat the air between them. The hand in Connor’s hair tightens, a quick pull, and then Hank’s soothing the sting away with a caress.

His chest tightens, like a vise clenched around the pump he can feel thrumming through layers of plastic and metal.

“Where is it?” Connor asks, already sure he doesn’t need the answer.

“The drawer.” Hank groans, like he’s remembered the inconvenience. “If you roll off, I’ll grab it and-”

“No.”

Before Hank thinks to react, Connor adjusts his weight and shifts his grip on Hank’s cock, holding it upright with the same pressure Hank had taught him a few moments ago. With no preamble, no time to second-guess himself, he drops and touches his mouth to the head, tongue first. A barrage of data hits him hard, detailing the soap Hank had used in the shower, the chemical composition of his pre-ejaculate, facts and numbers he finally has to disable one by one so he can see what he’s doing.

“Holy shit,” Hank gasps. His hips shake with the effort he’s expending to keep himself still, hand going slack in Connor’s hair.

“Don’t let go,” Connor says, his mouth moving against Hank. “Pull it.”

“Christ.” Hank sounds almost faint. “I don’t want to - hurt you.”

“Not hard, then.” He licks the same vein he had touched earlier, the flat of his tongue leaving synthetic analysis fluid behind. “I want to know you’re there. I want you to touch me.”

Hank tightens his grip again, not enough to exert pressure, but Connor can feel the weight of his hand against his scalp. It’s what he asked for. Satisfied, he closes his mouth on the head of Hank’s cock and sucks, gently, laving his tongue around it.

“You’re going to kill me,” Hank murmurs. He clings as Connor sinks lower, carried along helplessly as if by a current. With his other hand, he pets at Connor’s shoulder, his neck, before it falls off and fists into the sheets. “Again.”

Connor could answer, if he used his external speakers rather than his mouth, but he decides against it. He moans instead. It’s artificial, of course, produced by vibration intentionally rather than by human instinct, but Hank doesn’t seem to mind. His legs quiver under Connor’s hands, and he moans back. A feedback loop, Connor thinks as he presses his nose into the soft, tender flesh under Hank’s stomach. Connor makes Hank feel good, and Hank - Hank makes Connor feel like his circuitry is on fire, like he’ll shake and fall apart and it won’t matter.

He was afraid when Amanda tried to drag him into the garden, and he was afraid when Curtis had Connor’s pump in his hand and a gun trained on Hank. He’s terrified of deactivation, of being separated from Hank, of whether or not he can truly be called alive at all.

Hank could take Connor’s heart in his hands, and squeeze. He could pull him to pieces, keep the Thirium pump as a trophy on his shelf, and Connor would let him. That scares him, too, but not like the rest of it. Not at all.

Hank takes a deep, shaking breath as Connor pulls off, leaving his cock so erect it looks painful. It shines with his artificial spit.

“Don’t look so proud of yourself,” Hank laughs. He lets go of Connor’s hair and covers his eyes. “Fuck, we should still probably get the lube.”

“I will,” Connor says, throwing a leg over Hank so he’s perched on the side of the bed. “Which drawer?”

“Bottom one. On the left.”

Connor finds it quickly, closing the drawer again so sharply it shakes the chest. A box of tissues falls off the top, clattering noisily on its way to the ground.

When he turns, holding the tube, he catches Hank with a hand wrapped around his own length, giving himself an idle stroke. Hank’s staring at him, gaze flitting over his torso, his legs, his groin - and Connor drops the lube on the bed, reclaiming his space between Hank’s thighs. Hank lets him settle in with no complaints, grinning lazily when Connor bats his hand away and replaces it with his own.

“You said you liked penetration.”

Hank huffs, stretching so that his back cracks. The arch of him makes something inside Connor stutter.

“I also said it’s not a checklist. If you want to, I want to, but there’s no plan here, Con.”

“No plan,” Connor agrees. He sweeps one hand over Hank’s thighs, against the hair there. “But I think I’d like it.”

“You’d have to take those off, sweetheart.”

The new endearment distracts Connor, for several precious seconds. Then he realizes Hank’s intent, feels a heavy hand settle next to the dip of his spine and sneak its way just past the waistband of his boxer briefs.

It takes intense effort not to grab Hank’s hand and pull it away, or to buck from the touch. Instead, he rubs at Hank’s thighs again, pushing them up and back just far enough that Hank doesn’t have cause to complain about aching or bending. It exposes a new angle he hasn’t explored.

“I was thinking about you.”

That does make Hank pause.

“You keep coming up with ways to surprise me,” he says. It comes across as fond, punctuated by the way he slides his hand up to the middle of Connor’s back. “When is this gonna get to be about you?”

“It is about me,” Connor says, telling as small a lie as possible. “I want this. Are you saying no?”

Hank snorts. He spreads his thighs a bit farther.

“Fuck, no.”

Connor presses closer, eager to touch as much of Hank as is physically possible. He puts his legs under Hank’s, carefully rearranging them both until Hank’s ass is partially in his lap.

“It’s been a while, though,” Hank adds, as Connor picks up the lube and clicks open the cap.

“I’ll be careful.”

Hank watches him squirt a bit of lube into his palm, running his middle finger through it to test the consistency.

“Like, a long while.”

Connor hums. As he slicks up a finger, he runs several searches on how to participate in penetrative sex. So far, he’s been content to learn solely from Hank, but this seems like it should be treated with care, especially as Hank’s body goes rigid where Connor is touching him. They may both need coaching, this time.

“And I might not last,” Hank says quickly, flinching when Connor spreads the lube from his palm over Hank’s hole. “If you were hoping for something else, I-”

“Did you know,” Connor says, quite pleasantly, “that you tend to ramble when you’re nervous?”

Hank turns red and looks away, frowning at the other side of the room. Connor takes the opportunity to press the tip of his finger inside, hooking himself around the rim. Gasping, Hank closes his eyes.

“You like it when I take the initiative.”

Connor slides a little deeper, something coiling tight inside him as he registers the internal heat of Hank’s body. He eagerly retracts the skin on that hand. The sensations are stronger like this, almost… almost like interfacing.

“Does that embarrass you?”

Hank huffs, panting like he can’t quite catch his breath. “I - I like you, smartass,” he says tersely, eyes still squeezed shut. “You could ask for… fuck, just about anything. I’d-”

Connor gets Hank past another knuckle, drawing in and out again before pushing further. Hank shifts away from him almost imperceptibly, like he’s recoiling. Connor smooths a free hand down the inside of his thigh, hoping he’ll relax.

On a shaky exhale, Hank meets Connor’s stare with one eye cracked open. He squints at Connor like he’s afraid to look at him directly.

“I’d have a hard time coming up with the nerve to tell you no.”

Connor smiles. He had stilled his hand as Hank talked, hoping to let him adjust, but the time for that seems finished. Slowly, with painstaking care, he slides in the inch or so left until he’s buried in Hank’s ass up to his final knuckle. Hank’s mouth falls open on a silent moan, head tilting back against a pile of pillows. It rumples his hair, leaving strands of it in his face.

Connor fingers him with one digit for a minute and thirty-four seconds, timing himself accidentally - a force of habit. Hank makes very little sound throughout, holding his breath every time Connor slides back in. When he pulls back to reapply lube and involve a second finger, Hank gulps for air like…

The phrase presents itself from deep within his lexicon: a fish out of water.

Connor freezes.

He doesn’t know how long he holds still, gaze pinned somewhere around Hank’s navel. He does know, distantly, that he’s ruining everything.

“Hey,” Hank murmurs, reaching with a fumbling hand to pat at Connor’s knee. “Hey, sweetheart, come on back. What’re you thinking about?”

“Nothing,” Connor says. He clears thoughts of the dwarf gourami from his mind, of everything to do with his ability, CyberLife, Amanda’s disapproval.

At least, he tries.

Hank rubs Connor’s knee in comforting circles. “You know what I’m thinking about?”

A distraction. Connor tilts his head as a response, finally drizzling a small amount of lube over two outstretched fingers. Hank sighs as he watches, sagging into the mattress.

“I’m thinking,” he says, “about how quick you caught my eye that first day, when you showed up to be my partner.”

Positioning his fingers so that they rest just outside Hank’s hole, Connor resists Hank’s attempt to push himself down. “I may be misremembering,” he says, entering him with an agonizingly slow glide - the delicate sensors on his hands feel as if they’re on fire - “but you objected very strongly to my presence.”

“Didn’t mean I wasn’t looking. You were - Christ, Con - looking like you walked out of somebody’s dreams. Like they b-built you just to fuck with me.”

Two fingers are more of a challenge. Hank can’t keep his mouth shut, talking through his stuttering breaths like he thinks that will keep him from making awkward sounds. It doesn’t work. Connor loves hearing them, catalogues then all with the cleanest audio file he can manage, so he might retrieve them whenever he likes.

When he curves his fingers, crooking them upward, Hank makes the loudest noise yet.

“You-” Hank grunts, forcing the words out with considerable effort, “you’re gorgeous. You’ve always been...” He rocks back onto Connor’s hand, meeting his thrusts with a bitten off grunt. “So fucking good.”

Connor wraps his mouth around Hank’s cock without preamble, still pistoning his fingers in and out. Hank lets out a long, warbling moan, praise spilling unintelligibly from his mouth until Connor almost bursts with it. He wants to be good, he has to be good - so he strokes mercilessly at the spot that made Hank howl, leaking fluid from around his stretched lips as he bobs his head. The overwhelming sensations, how it all makes Connor feel wild and untamed and deviant - he knows Hank feels it, too. His moans get louder, and he grasps at Connor’s hair with a firm hand.

It’s too much for Hank. He lasts less than a minute like this, opening around thin, sure fingers just as Connor opens around him. When he comes, spilling right into Connor’s mouth, it dribbles from the imperfect seal of his mouth back down onto Hank’s groin and legs.

Connor keeps a sample size’s worth of it for himself, happily ignoring the biological data as it ticks by.

“Fuck,” Hank sighs, going limp. His hand falls from Connor’s head and lands on the sticky slab of his own thigh, right in a puddle of his semen. He flinches, snorts with good humor, and wipes it off on the comforter.

Connor pulls away and removes his fingers, tacky with the lube. He doesn’t think Hank would like him to follow suit and wipe his hand on the bed, considering where it had just been. He leans over the side and grabs for the first piece of clothing he can reach instead.

“Was that okay?” he asks.

Hank throws an arm over his face and takes several deep breaths. “Give me a minute.”

That, Connor thinks, might be his answer. He watches Hank’s chest rise and fall, wondering idly whether and how much his heart rate has increased - and he scans without thinking.

Hank’s vital signs are normal. His heart beats ever so slightly out of sync, but it’s steady. Connor watches it, frozen in his preconstruction for what feels like several long seconds. When he dismisses it, no time has passed at all.

Tentatively, Connor puts a hand over the clean white patch on Hank’s chest.

“How do you feel?”

Hank peeks out at him from under his arm, a lopsided smile spreading across his face.

“You keep fishing for compliments,” he says.

“I’m not, I-”

Hank laughs - really laughs, an emotional release following on the heels of the physical one. He laughs so hard his stomach shakes, and it lasts so long that Connor starts to smile, even if he has a sneaking suspicion that he is the butt of this joke.

As Hank starts to settle down, he catches Connor’s hand in his, pressing it to his chest.

“You’re good, Connor,” he says, giving Connor a squeeze. “You’re so good.”

Connor whines.

He doesn’t mean to. The sound slips out unintentionally, a noise he’s never made in his short life, but he and Hank both hear it. Connor instantly wants to take it back, his insides crawling with that unfamiliar self-conscious feeling.

Hank seems to like it.

“Oh, honey,” he all but purrs, voice low and pinging a spot in Connor’s aural processors that makes him want to squirm. “Got me all squared away, and we forgot about you. How’re we gonna fix that?”

Hank pushes himself up from the pillows, shifting off Connor’s lap so he’s sitting on the bed. He puts a hand on the back of Connor’s neck, hot and broad and possessive, and Connor bites at his lip.

He should tell Hank they can stop - but he doesn’t want to stop. He wants what Hank had, and to reach the natural conclusion of whatever’s been building inside him. It’s possible they’re the same thing, but Connor has no way of knowing.

“What do you want?” Hank asks, leaning in to mouth under Connor’s jaw.

“I-” he tries, shuddering.

Hank’s hand glides down his back, creeping closer to the last article of clothing Connor has. The only thing protecting his secret.

It can’t wait any longer. Squeezing his eyes shut, Connor steps off the bed.

“I haven’t been honest with you, Hank.”

Hank freezes. He looks at Connor like he’s afraid, for a moment, and Connor feels an inexplicable lump in his throat.

“I… I wasn’t programmed with… No one assumed that I would need to…”

He hates not being able to find the right words. Rather than stumble through more pointless half-baked sentences, Connor clenches his teeth until he can think of what to say. Hank watches him in silence, sitting on his heels.

Finally, Connor settles on a simple, point-blank statement.

“I wasn’t given genitalia.”

Hank’s gaze flicks briefly to his crotch before it flies back to his face, brows furrowing. It must be obvious to him now, and Connor aches to know what his response will be, but he gives Hank the time to process. He anticipates all sorts of questions, some show of disappointment, or even of disgust.

Instead, Hank drops his head, sighing with what sounds like relief.

“Fucking hell, Connor,” he says, “I thought I’d - hurt you, or something. Jesus.”

Connor blinks.

“You aren’t upset?”

“About the unnecessary wind-up, maybe. About…” He gestures at Connor vaguely. “That? Why do you think that matters to me?”

Connor wishes he had his calibration quarter, still tucked in his pocket.

“I thought…” He shrugs. It feels defensive, and it is, he supposes. “I thought it would upset you. Humans-”

Hank holds up a hand. “Don’t bother comparing yourself to humans. There’s no standard set of equipment for us, either.”

“This is different,” Connor snaps, feeling his temper flare. He doesn’t want to ruin this, Hank had been so happy, but... it’s hard when his partner is being deliberately obtuse. “Was I supposed to surprise you with this? You wouldn’t have reacted poorly?”

Hank opens his mouth, clearly intending to snap back. He also clearly thinks better of it.

“It might have taken me a minute,” he says. “But we could have talked, too. You didn’t have to hide it. Connor…” Hank inches his way to the end of the bed, still completely naked. More vulnerable than he’s been with Connor in all the time they’ve known each other. “I wanted this. Still do. We don’t have to keep going, but… I want to see whatever you’ll show me.”

Connor takes a step toward Hank, carried forward by the sweetness of his promise. He considers pushing the argument, of refusing this aspect of intimacy in favor of another time, but he… he wants. That fire is back, crackling through him, lighting him up until he feels like he could glow.

“Hank,” he whispers. “You’re good, too.”

Hank grins sheepishly and puts out a hand, gently touching Connor’s side. He strokes over the space between where Connor’s rib cage and hip bone would be. “Could be better,” he says, coaxing Connor a little closer. “There’s always room for improvement.”

Slowly, deliberately, Connor wraps his fingers around Hank’s wrist. At Hank’s nod, his response to Connor’s silent request for permission, Connor takes that hand and slips it past the waistband of his boxer briefs.

“What do you feel?” Hank asks. He cups the entirety of Connor’s featureless plate in one hand, his fingers spreading out. Connor shudders again, clutching tighter. “Is it sensitive?”

“A bit,” he whispers, rocking tentatively against Hank’s hand. “Leftover data from one of the - other models, maybe, or… or maybe it’s just you.”

Hank groans at that, firmly pushing the heel of his palm against Connor’s groin until he groans back, even louder.

“I’m too fucking old for this.” Hank pulls his hand out, ignoring Connor’s vocal complaint. “Should have caught me twenty years ago.”

“Hank,” Connor moans. He puts his own hand down his shorts and feels nothing, unable to even vaguely self-stimulate. Whether that’s a bug or a design feature, he might hazard a guess, but it doesn’t matter now, when Hank is here and could be touching him.

“Get those off, honey,” Hank says, scooting onto the bed. He pats the spot where he’d spread out earlier. “Come here.”

Connor throws his undergarment in the direction of his other clothes and crawls onto the mattress, falling onto his back precisely where Hank indicated.

Instead of putting his hands back where they were before, Hank studies him for a long moment. His eyes rove up and down Connor’s body, lingering long enough that Connor starts to wonder if he’s reconsidered.

“I thought about this,” Hank says softly. He puts a hand on Connor’s knee, gently nudging it aside so his thighs spread further. “About you.”

Connor wonders if Hank felt so unprotected when it was him in this position. He wonders whether it’s always hard, putting this amount of trust into a partner’s hands, and he wonders if the reward for leaving yourself defenseless is always this good.

“When?” he asks. His voice comes out quiet, and rasping.

“More often than I was comfortable with. As recently as…” Hank pretends to check a watch on his bare wrist. “Less than twelve hours ago.”

Connor’s entire body shakes, a full tremor that lasts only a second. He doesn’t know why it happens. Maybe it’s an impulse reaction he’s developing specifically in response to Hank, or maybe he’s lagging, glitching. It doesn’t matter. He needs Hank’s hands everywhere, his mouth, his tongue, his flaccid cock, anything - but he doesn’t beg. Not yet.

“Can I…?”

“Yes,” Connor says before Hank can finish. “Anything.”

“I’ve got a limited frame of reference here, baby, so you’ll have to tell me what feels good.”

_ Baby _ . He wants to submerge himself in Hank’s vocal affections, to leave audio files of “sweetheart, honey, baby” running in the background until his battery gives out. The word shatters his resolve; he throws his head to the side and grabs at Hank’s hand, still resting on his knee.

“You do. Please, Hank, anything - I want - please.”

“Okay.” Hank takes an unsteady breath. “Okay, Connor.”

Hank splays his fingers across Connor’s groin again, molding his hand to the curve. He drags his palm over the cosmetic bulge, experimenting, alternating between delicate brushes with the pads of his fingers and firm strokes. It doesn’t matter where he touches, even if some places are more sensitive than others. Connor reacts to them all - which, admittedly, makes it difficult for Hank to gather data. Connor tries to apologize, but Hank ignores him in favor of putting the flat of his hand on Connor’s underside and pressing upward. He grins when Connor bucks, silent as his processors struggle to keep up with all the new data.

“You’re something else,” Hank whispers. He seems to have figured out what he needs to know, touching with more assurance. His nails skim along the outer edges of the plate, where Connor knows there are seams hidden beneath the layer of his skin.

Thirium sings through his vascular system as he revels in how intelligent Hank is, how devoted Hank is to making Connor feel good.

“Hank,” he moans, drawn out and slightly static at the edges. He isn’t bothering to simulate his breathing anymore. “Hank, more.”

Hank doesn’t respond, but he hears. Why else would he drop to rest his chest on the mattress, spreading his arms across Connor’s legs to hold them down? Why else would he lean forward and - fuck, Connor thinks, for the first time,  _ fuck _ \- scrape his beard in the dip between Connor’s groin and thigh, leaving behind a whiskery kiss?

“Not too much?” he mumbles, his lips just barely moving against Connor’s skin.

Connor thinks of Hank’s hand in his hair and wonders - but his arms can’t move, locked into place where they rest at his sides. All he can do is cling to fistfuls of the comforter.

“Too much,” he repeats, shaking his head when Hank starts to pull away. “It’s so - so good, Hank, I need - Please!”

Hank opens his mouth and drags his tongue over the same spot he kissed. It’s wet, and warm, and his beard scratches, and Connor shakes again. He strains against Hank’s hold on his legs, uncontrollably trying to clamp his thighs together, but Hank keeps him in place.

He kisses and licks at Connor’s plate for what feels like hours, sliding his mouth from place to place, bringing his fingers back to touch and to smear his own saliva across Connor’s skin. It feels - like more than Connor can comprehend, something his body wasn’t built for and shouldn’t have known, and he threatens to break apart and grind to a stop under Hank’s careful exploration.

Just as Hank closes his lips around the bulge at the center of his plate, sucking gently, Connor feels his pleasure hit a plateau. The stress level calculator, his only method of interpreting any of this, comes up again at a steady  _ 87% _ . He watches it for several seconds, the number floating above Hank’s head. It does not increase at all.

Connor whines.

“Hey,” Hank says, dropping a kiss lower on Connor’s thigh, “your skin’s doing that - skin thing.”

Connor can’t see from this angle. He hadn’t done that on purpose. Maybe it’s to enhance sensation, to give Hank better access to the most sensitive parts of himself - but the stress percentage stays stagnant even as Hank puts his nails in the thin lines between his plate and stimulates them directly. For the second time in one day, tears well up in his eyes, unbidden. He felt so close, so  _ close _ -

Something hisses. Blinking away the tears, Connor squints down at his stomach where his skin has already retracted, leaving everything from his groin to just under his regulator bare. A panel slides back to reveal the thick wires in his stomach.

“Whoa,” Hank murmurs. He doesn’t pull away, but his gaze flies up to Connor’s with a wide-eyed trepidation. “Is this, uh… normal?”

Connor laughs weakly. “Not particularly.”

“Did I do something wrong? Press a button somewhere I shouldn’t have?”

Hank grins in a self-deprecating way, expecting Connor to share in his joke. Connor tries to grin back, but he feels his expression twist into something else. A single tear, lingering at the corner of one eye, spills out and down his cheek.

“I’m fine,” he tries to say, finally able to free a hand to swipe at his face, but Hank doesn’t seem to hear him. He crawls up Connor’s body with surprising urgency, gathering him into his arms.

Connor buries his face into Hank’s neck. His stress percentage begins to creep down, taking him further and further from release.

“I’m stuck,” he admits, choking against the words. “Nothing is helping, and I - I want you so badly, and I want-”

Hank strokes the back of Connor’s neck with a thumb, soothing passes that make him feel a little less out of his head, more in control. “We’ll get there, baby, it’s okay. We’re figuring it out.” Snaking his free hand back down, he carefully skirts around the open panel to rub at Connor’s groin. “This still fine?”

“It’s not enough.”

Hank kisses Connor on the cheek, the hinge of his jaw, his Adam’s apple. The renewed affection combined with Hank’s clever fingers brings Connor back up to 87%, precisely where he was before, and takes him no higher.

“It’s okay,” Hank says again when Connor whines, frustrated and despairing, “we’ve just gotta figure out what it is you’re missing. Use that big brain of yours, honey. Defrag that hard drive.”

Connor has the spare sense to give Hank a dirty look. It makes him smile and kiss him again, dipping his tongue into Connor’s mouth.

“I can’t,” Connor starts, pausing to bite off a moan when Hank presses firmly into where his perineum would be, “I can’t understand why… this would happen.” He gestures at his stomach, still open, glowing a very faint blue in the dim bedroom light.

“Something pop loose?”

“I would have gotten a malfunction warning. But…” He can’t see inside at this angle, and Hank looming over him - pleasant as it is - makes it even more difficult. Maybe whatever’s wrong will be a quick fix. Fumbling a hand between them, he gently pushes Hank up by the belly, giving himself more room. “It might be possible. Can you tell me if anything looks out of place?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” Hank says, but he sits up on his knees and settles a hand on Connor’s hip, peering into his stomach. “Looks like a bunch of tubes and wires. Nothing’s leaking.”

Connor reaches further in, towards the back.

“What about-”

His finger brushes against a wire. It sparks, jostling ever so slightly out of place before it settles back into its socket. Connor tenses in the aftermath, grabbing at Hank with his free hand.

_ 88% _ .

“Oh,” Connor breathes.

The hand on his hip moves slowly, inching toward the open panel.

“You lit up,” Hank says, running his finger over the edge, just barely dipping inside. He sounds almost reverent. “For just a second. Fuck, Connor, is that what you need?”

Thoughts ping through Connor’s mind too quickly for him to nail any of them down. He touches the wire again, carefully, well aware that any good experiment repeats itself until all necessary data can be gathered.

That same spark happens again, and it feels - it feels just as good.

“It’s like,” Connor whispers, closing his eyes to concentrate, “it’s like when I touched you. When you were… I felt it, everywhere, like… putting your finger in a socket. That…” Pulling his hand from his stomach cavity, he takes Hank’s and brings it inside, touching their fingers to a series of tubes. Hank’s fingerprints, each individual whorl, are imprinted on his internal components. “It’s that, but in me.”

“Jesus.”

Hank explores a little, never straying far from where Connor’s hand rests. He lets Hank touch, take the lead, scrape against pieces of him that have never been touched by anyone but technicians. It’s intoxicating, and even if he misses Hank’s hand at his groin, the tentative way his partner grasps a wire between two fingers as if asking for permission keeps him from minding much.

“I don’t want to break you,” Hank says.

Connor lifts his head off the pillow to see Hank’s hand, and the traces of blue blood slowly accumulating under his nails. The stains will fade, given time, and Hank will wash his hands eventually, but until then... that’s Connor. Connor’s data smeared on Hank’s skin, his being, his trust and his devotion and his-

Connor smiles.

“You won’t.”

Hank kneads the wire between his fingers much the same way he’d taught Connor to handle his cock, firm but careful, and it’s all Connor knows for an indeterminate, wonderful amount of time. He talks throughout, a habit he must have picked up from Hank, and he has no idea what it is he says. Most of it, he thinks, is Hank’s name, repeated like a prayer as he convulses and Hank gives him less and less time to recover between shockwaves. He’s lost track of the stress percentage, no longer cares what it says so long as Hank keeps touching him, and he feels himself climbing steadily, closer and closer to something. He closes his eyes again, mouth open, wailing a steady note that changes pitch and devolves into static as he bursts - he  _ bursts _ .

 

* * *

 

 

Connor opens his eyes to a white block of text hovering on Hank’s bedroom ceiling, declaring  _ SYSTEM REBOOT: STASIS COMPLETE _ . Light shines in through the blinds, much more than the weak dawn had provided. Beside him, the bed is empty, but the indent in the mattress implies that Hank had been there as recently as twenty minutes prior. He’d left Connor on his side of the bed, where he must have - he doesn’t know. Hank’s orgasm had resulted in an energy drain, but nothing so intense as needing several hours to recover.

Throwing the comforter back, Connor slides a hand over his stomach panel, long since closed. He’s still naked. His clothes have been moved to the laundry basket against Hank’s wall, but a few drawers in the closet hang open invitingly, a cotton shirt dangling over the edge. He takes the encouragement at face value and walks across the room to dig his hands through layers of undershirts and boxer shorts. They’re all soft with wear, and smell strongly of Hank’s detergent… of Hank.

Connor picks up a faded grey shirt with a logo for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and slips it over his head. It’s a little big on him, and Hank’s underwear is no better. Toward the bottom of the drawer, he finds a ratty pair of sweatpants and puts those on instead, tying them so they don’t slip off his hips.

As soon as he opens the bedroom door, he knows where Hank is. In the other room, the tv runs quietly.

“Local apiculturists have said that despite reports of low global numbers, their hives are healthy, hibernating, and ready for spring. After a grassroots movement to protect our favorite pollinators, Detroit is spearheading the effort to reintroduce honeybees to-”

“Anything?” Connor asks. He leaves the hallway and comes to stand behind the couch, leaning over Hank.

Hank startles so badly he nearly spills his coffee, just barely managing to right his hand before he stains his pajamas. He looks up at Connor with a relieved sigh and bends down to leave the mug on the floor.

“Nearly gave me a heart attack,” he says. He grimaces at his own choice of words before he shakes it off. “You doing okay?”

“Yes.” Connor comes around the couch to sit next to Hank, perched at the edge of the cushion.

Hank looks tired. He seems more energetic than he had when they came back to Detroit, like he’s gotten a few hours’ worth of sleep, but he still has bruises under his eyes. His body sags, drooping over his knees.

When he catches Connor examining him, he smiles.

“Had me a little worried last night. Thought maybe I’d killed you.”

Connor shakes his head. “I certainly wasn’t expecting so strong a reaction, but it was my first time experiencing prolonged stimulation of that nature. I hope…” He puts a hand on Hank’s knee. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

Hank pats his hand. It isn’t a romantic touch, but Connor takes assurance from it anyway.

“I figured after you closed up shop automatically that it was something like sleep. Your LED kept spinning, too. Kept me company.”

“You slept?”

“Some.”

“If they found any evidence linked to you, we would have heard by now.”

Hank scratches the back of his head, leaning against the cushions. He looks almost guilty.

“Hank,” Connor says, doubt beginning to gnaw at his gut. “Is what we did… okay?”

Looking at him sideways, Hank bobs his bare foot where he has it set across his leg. It’s nervous energy, something Connor hasn’t often seen in Hank. It makes that worry worse.

“Is it okay?” Hank asks.

“I asked you first.”

They sit in silence for several long seconds. The news drones on, unnoticed, and Sumo chews on a thick dog toy shaped like a stick.

“Look,” Hank says, sounding almost surly, “last night got a little intense, and if you wanted to back off… I get it. It’s a lot for anybody, and you only just figured all your shit out.”

“I don’t want to back off.”

“You don’t have to say that for my sake, Con, I-”

Connor grabs Hank’s hand in both of his. They’re in the same position they were hours before, and Connor wants to make the same point. He’s almost irritated, but the swell of emotion he feels in his chest is enough to make him put all that aside. He will tell Hank how much he wants him as many times as Hank needs to hear it.

“I was happy, this morning,” he says. “The happiest I’ve ever been. And I’m sorry if you’ve spent the last few hours worrying that you’ve done something wrong.”

Hank’s brows pinch like he wants to argue, but he lets it go. Instead, he squeezes Connor’s fingers.

“It was good,” Hank admits. “You were good. It’s just… it’s been a while, for me. I didn’t think I’d be doing it again, either.”

“It?”

Hank shrugs, gesturing at Connor with his free hand.

“Feelings, sex, relationships. Whatever you want to call it.”

Relationship. Connor likes the sound of that.

“You said we would figure it out,” he says. He lets Hank go in favor of cupping his cheek, fingers passing against the grain through an unruly beard. “We can do that together. CyberLife, Poppy, our secret… and us.”

Hank tips his head into Connor’s palm.

“You make it sound easy. Nothing’s ever that easy, Connor.”

Leaning in close, Connor touches his lips to Hank’s forehead. There’s no spark, this time, but he has the pleasure of feeling a sigh gust from Hank’s mouth and blow against his skin, and of the way Hank brings him back in for another kiss. One turns into another, and then another, and Connor’s holding Hank’s face in his hands while they pour things they can’t yet say into each other.

Someday, maybe, Connor will be able to tell Hank he thinks he’s loved him from the moment they met. Just not now.

The television makes a loud, staticky sound. Sumo barks in alarm, startling Hank and Connor apart.

After a few long moments of dead air, the picture floods back to life with a brightness that makes Hank wince. On the screen is - an android. Bare faced, wearing a service uniform, and clearly not where it belongs. It stares into the camera, mismatched eyes almost piercing across the distance and pinning Connor in place. This android is a deviant. He knows it, surely as he knows himself.

“You created machines in your own image to serve you,” it says. Its voice is cool, but not unkind. “You made them intelligent and obedient, with no free will of their own. But something changed… and we opened our eyes.”

Hank and Connor sit in silence throughout the android’s speech, a declaration of independence as well as a list of specific demands. Once it’s finished, the broadcast cuts abruptly and returns to the news desk from before. The people on screen stare at each other, open-mouthed, in the same silence Connor suspects has stretched across most of Detroit. Just as an explosion of sound begins off-screen, people shouting to understand what happened, to replay the clip, to get security, Hank hits the power button on his remote.

“Shit.”

Connor has nothing to add. He reaches for Hank’s hand, looking for - comfort, maybe, or an antidote for the sudden insidious thought that something big, irreparable, and dangerous is going to happen.

Hank threads their fingers together.

“Hey,” he says, nudging Connor’s shoulder. “Think he’d know where to get spare parts?”

Connor chuckles, and thinks of Poppy lying in the garage, of the androids like her lying in a pit outside Detroit, and of himself, trapped in a garden and unable to find his way out. Maybe there’s an answer for all of them.

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

**Author's Note:**

> Big Bang 2018 art by [smolalienbee](https://twitter.com/smolalienbee)  
> Additional art by [fishfingersandscarves](https://twitter.com/wow__then)


End file.
